NASA's curiosity rover has found evidence of ancient water on Mars according a press release from the administration.
"We examined pebbly sandstone deposited by water flowing over the surface, and veins or fractures in the rock," Dawn Summer of the University of California, Davis, and member of the curiosity team said in a statement. "We know the veins are younger than the sandstone because they cut through it, but they appear to be filled with grains like the sandstone.
"If the same fluid flow produced the veins here and the veins at Yellowknife Bay, you would expect the veins to have the same composition. We see that the veins are different, so we know the history is complicated. We use these observations to piece together the long-term history," she said.
After originally not finding concrete evidence that water did indeed exist on the red planet in liquid form, the rover had the opportunity to gain more information about the natural resources following a visit to a big mountain on the planet as it was going to Mount Sharp the release reported. The mountain is 3.4 miles high.
Over the past week, the rover examined a group of rocks at the mountain, just one out of five locations researchers planned to take the robot to. The curiosity rover took nine images with its MAHLI camera or the Mars Hand Lends Imager the release reported.
The latest developments are the first since researchers sent Curiosity on the red planet's Gale Crater last August to see if water was once allowed to exist with previous conditions on the planet. In March, the rover found a location near the place it landed on the planet, which resembled water-like conditions such as dampness, and rocks with small pebbles and other tiny particles similar to sand.
