Mars water appears to have been an especially good element for life, according to a new study.
Mars is one of the most likely homes for alien life in our solar system, and water is believed to be an essential requirement for life, as we know it, to be maintained.
Previous studies have suggested that the red planet would have once been home to flowing water lakes, which could have harbored life.
But there is still no evidence to suggest that alien life lived on the planet – or that there is still some evidence of it.
In an attempt to understand what Mars would look like in ancient times and whether it was inhabited, scientists sought to understand the chemistry of water that would be found on the planet billions of years ago.
They did so by looking at the materials left on that planet today, which could offer a clue to what it was like before.
Recent measurements taken by the probe jeep Curiosity from NASA on the Martian surface suggest that the water that once covered its surface could have the right ingredients to support any microbial life that would have formed on the planet.
The new study looked at sediments that appeared to have been left in lakes in the Gale de Mars Crater. He found that they appeared to form in the presence of liquid water with a pH similar to that of Earth’s oceans.
This suggests that the initial surface of Mars would have been the kind of place that could have served as a home for life, like Earth.
An article detailing the discovery, entitled ‘Semiarid climate and hyposaline lake on early Mars inferred from reconstructed water chemistry at Gale‘(‘ Semi-arid climate and hyposaline lake in early Mars inferred from reconstructed water chemistry in Gale ’), was published in Nature Communications.