New Evidence Ancient Mars Was More Earth-Like Than Thought
Ancient Mars is believed to have been a wet world. Possibly it was a cold world, with frosts and floods, rather than a tropical paradise
It might have had a denser carbon dioxide atmosphere too, and the composition of that atmosphere is now being called into question.
That's because chemical elements suggest that it could have been more Earth-like than was ever thought possible.
The findings come from NASA’s Curiosity, which is investigating Gale Crater, the site of an ancient lake.
It is difficult for manganese oxide to form on the surface of Mars, so we didn't expect to find it in such high concentrations in a shoreline deposit,"
these types of deposits happen all the time because of the high oxygen in our atmosphere produced by photosynthetic life
Obviously, we can’t assume it was life that produced the oxygen, and that the oxygen created this chemical compound and then disappeared over eons.
The compounds might have simply formed on the lake shore from lake water. It might have formed from groundwater moving through the sands