Now that the scientific community has proven that Mars had habitable surface environments in its early existence, new and more elaborate studies are following.
Water, energy sources, elements such as carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, sulfur, and crucial catalytic transition metals linked to life were all produced by these habitable conditions on the planet. However, it is unknown, if that possibility sparked continued development toward the independent emergence of life on Mars.
A team of scientists involving Juergen Schieber, a Professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences within the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington, and colleagues on NASA’s Curiosity Rover mission, uncovered the first solid evidence for sustained wet-dry cycling on early Mars. This condition is a significant step for prebiotic chemical evolution and a stepping-stone toward the emergence of life.
‘Sustained wet-dry cycling on early Mars’ is a new paper published in the scientific journal Nature, where Schieber and his co-authors analysed data from the Curiosity Rover that currently explores Gale Crater region of Mars to study the ancient pattern of mud cracks filled with salt (geometric patterns like pentagons or hexagons) observed in 3.6 billion-year-old mudstones.
According to the new paper, as the mud dries out, it shrinks and fractures into T-shaped junctions – like what Curiosity found earlier at “Old Soaker,” a collection of mud cracks lower down on Mount Sharp. Those junctions indicate that Old Soaker’s mud was, at one point, formed and dried. Also, the repeated exposures to water that created the new mud cracks caused the T-junctions to soften and become Y-shaped, eventually forming a hexagonal pattern.
According to earlier studies, likely residuals from the lake’s desiccation should be calcium and magnesium sulfate minerals. The team used the “ChemCam” instrument on the Curiosity Rover to probe the cemented ridges to confirm their chemical composition. The sedimentary features of the mudstones that Schieber and his co-authors studied can be described to have resulted from multiple wetting and drying cycles resulting in mineral precipitates—minerals left behind when water evaporates—stacked on top of each other over time.