We all know humanity has been struggling to conquer the red planet for years now. Well, the moment has come to find out more about this exciting planet for us. The Curiosity rover was launched in 2011 and has been digging through the red planet ever since. Great discoveries have been bound to happen.
Boron is a chemical signature of evaporated water which means that there was, at some point, habitable groundwater. Although we don’t know if Mars ever hosted life, this discovery shows that the planet was once full of habitable water flows. The place where they discovered this chemical compound indicates that the water was in a suitable condition to host micro life. The Curiosity rover found Boron on the slopes of Mount Sharp located in the Gale Crater. The integrated laser technology within the rover helped with the identification of this chemical compound.
Although scientists associate Boron on Earth with locations rich with water it doesn’t mean it’s the same case with Mars. The team of experts working on the matter believes that the Boron could have been dissolved in the big lake that once was a part of the Gale Crater. As time passed by and the lake started drying up, the Boron soaked into groundwater. However, these are all assumptions, and further testing would be needed to determine the exact cause of Boron’s origins.
So, even though we can’t be sure about how did it end up in this location and nowhere else, this team of scientists has two possible hypotheses in mind.
Life on Mars
The first one is that the drying of the Gale Lake resulted in the large presence of Boron particles in the findings. The other one is that maybe there were shifts in the chemistry of groundwater and it changed the method of Boron movement through local sediments. The results appeared in a large Geophysical meeting in San Francisco, and they are due to be released.
Without firm evidence to support the idea of life on Mars, we cannot be sure of it. However, the further we advance with the experiments, and the further we push our technology, it becomes clearer and more possible. These discoveries are significant because we can find out whether or not there was life on the red planet at some point. This discovery will also help us answer some of the most fundamental questions about humans and the human race in general – why do we feel so alone?
