NASA / JPL-Caltech / Cornell / ASU
This panorama from NASA's Opportunity rover, made on June 1, shows Solander Point rising up on the Martian horizon. Mission managers plan to get the solar-powered rover to a north-facing slope on Solander Point by August, so that it can shelter there during the Martian winter.
Nearly 10 years after its launch, NASA's Opportunity rover has found its first evidence that Mars once had non-acidic water - the kind of water that could easily sustain the life we typically see on Earth.
"This is water that you can drink," Cornell astronomer Steve Squyres, principal investigator for Opportunity's long-lived Mars mission, told reporters Friday.
The water isn't there anymore, but the minerals left behind bear an aluminum-rich chemical signature that suggests they were formed through interaction with neutral-pH water. That's different from the previous evidence that Opportunity found, pointing to more acidic water. Some extreme forms of life on Earth could tolerate that environment, but it wouldn't have been as friendly an environment for prebiotic chemistry - the chemistry that's thought to have given rise to life on Earth.
"This is water that you can drink," Cornell astronomer Steve Squyres, principal investigator for Opportunity's long-lived Mars mission, told reporters Friday.
The water isn't there anymore, but the minerals left behind bear an aluminum-rich chemical signature that suggests they were formed through interaction with neutral-pH water. That's different from the previous evidence that Opportunity found, pointing to more acidic water. Some extreme forms of life on Earth could tolerate that environment, but it wouldn't have been as friendly an environment for prebiotic chemistry - the chemistry that's thought to have given rise to life on Earth.
The newly announced findings, based on X-ray analysis of a rock nicknamed Esperance, add to similar evidence of neutral water that was found on the other side of the Red Planet by NASA's bigger and more capable Curiosity rover. Taken together, they flesh out the story of a planet that was friendly to life's conditions early in its existence but became colder, drier and less hospitable as it lost its global magnetic field and much of its atmosphere.
