Now that their Curiosity rover has reached its ultimate science destination, NASA researchers believe they can explain Mount Sharp's existence.
According to BBC News, the rover recently beamed back substantial evidence that the mountain was once surrounded by several large aboveground lakes. Standing about three miles high and situated in the middle of the Gale Crater, Mount Sharp likely became so prominent when the lakes dried out and strong winds cleared the surrounding area.
But the discovery suggests Mars once had a wet and warm atmosphere and quite possibly an ocean somewhere on the surface. The scientists observing Curiosity also said the Red Planet likely experienced different kinds of weather events like rain and snow to get such
a climate.
"If our hypothesis for Mount Sharp holds up, it challenges the notion that warm and wet conditions were transient, local, or only underground on Mars," Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity deputy project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a press release. "A more radical explanation is that Mars' ancient, thicker atmosphere raised temperatures above freezing globally, but so far we don't know how the atmosphere did that."
Whereas past discoveries from Curiosity had hinted at water, and therefore the past possibility of microbial life on Mars, this one makes it plain and simple. However, mission managers acknowledged that there is more work to be done.
"We are making headway in solving the mystery of Mount Sharp," John Grotzinger, a Curiosity project scientist, said in the release. "Where there's now a mountain, there may have once been a series of lakes.
"The great thing about a lake that occurs repeatedly, over and over, is that each time it comes back it is another experiment to tell you how the environment works," he said. "As Curiosity climbs higher on Mount Sharp, we will have a series of experiments to show patterns in how the atmosphere and the water and the sediments interact. We may see how the chemistry changed in the lakes over time. This is a hypothesis supported by what we have observed so far, providing a framework for testing in the coming year."
