00:00Was Mars ever habitable by living creatures?
00:06That's a question NASA's Curiosity rover has been trying to determine for years.
00:10And recently, according to new evidence gathered in the Gale crater, where the rover has been exploring,
00:14the red planet may have been able to harbor life billions of years ago.
00:18The rover found manganese oxide, which is a mineral that is often found in lakes on our planet.
00:23On Earth, it occurs during oxidation, meaning oxygen must be present when the crystals form.
00:28If the same process once happened on Mars, it could mean that the planet once had enough oxygen for life to survive.
00:34Geochemist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Patrick Gazda, had this to say about it.
00:39On Earth, these types of deposits happen all the time because of the high oxygen in our atmosphere,
00:43produced by photosynthetic life and from microbes that help catalyze these manganese oxidation reactions.
00:49However, he also says that because we don't yet have evidence of life on Mars or how oxygen would have been produced there,
00:55this discovery raises as many questions as it does answers.
00:58With planetary scientist Nina Lanza saying,
01:01the Gale Lake environment as revealed by these ancient rocks gives us a window into a habitable environment
01:06that looks surprisingly similar to places on Earth today.
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