Scientists have learned a lot about Mars in recent years, and based on observations from the fancy hardware NASA has sent to the Red Planet we know that it once held far more water than we see today. But knowing there was lots of water (or at least abundant ice) on Mars long ago doesn’t necessarily tell us what the climate was like.
Without a time machine, we can’t know exactly what ancient Mars looked like, but researchers have come up with a pretty solid guess. Using data from NASA’s CRISM spectrometer and the Curiosity rover, scientists have a good idea of what kinds of minerals are present in the Martian soil. Using various areas of Earth as analogs, they can observe the conditions that caused similar mineral deposition patterns on our planet and assume that similar climates were responsible for their formation on Mars as well.
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Mars was once warm and rainy before turning frigid, study finds originally appeared on BGR.com on Tue, 20 Aug 2019 at 17:31:53 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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