Ancient Mars tagged posts

Underground Microbes may have Swarmed Ancient Mars

Underground microbes may have swarmed ancient Mars
This image made available by NASA shows the Jezero Crater area on the planet Mars, captured by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Ancient Mars may have had an environment capable of harboring an underground world teeming with microscopic organisms. That’s according to French scientists who published their findings, Monday, Oct. 10, 2022. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/USGS via AP, File

Ancient Mars may have had an environment capable of harboring an underground world teeming with microscopic organisms, French scientists reported Monday.

But if they existed, these simple life forms would have altered the atmosphere so profoundly that they triggered a Martian Ice Age and snuffed themselves out, the researchers concluded.

The findings provide a bleak view of the ways of the cosmos...

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NASA’s Curiosity Rover finds clues to chilly Ancient Mars buried in Rocks

This graphic depicts paths by which carbon has been exchanged among Martian interior, surface rocks, polar caps, waters and atmosphere, and it also depicts a mechanism by which it is lost from the atmosphere.
Credits: Lance Hayashida/Caltech

By studying the chemical elements on Mars today — including carbon and oxygen — scientists can work backwards to piece together the history of a planet that once had the conditions necessary to support life.

Weaving this story, element by element, from roughly 140 million miles (225 million kilometers) away is a painstaking process. But scientists aren’t the type to be easily deterred...

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