00:00was mars ever habitable by living creatures that's a question nasa's curiosity rover has
00:08been trying to determine for years and recently according to new evidence gathered in the gale
00:12crater where the rover has been exploring the red planet may have been able to harbor life
00:16billions of years ago the rover found manganese oxide which is a mineral that is often found
00:22in lakes on our planet on earth it occurs during oxidation meaning oxygen must be present when the
00:27crystals form if the same process once happened on mars it could mean that the planet once had
00:32enough oxygen for life to survive geochemist at los alamos national laboratory patrick gazda had
00:37this to say about it on earth these types of deposits happen all the time because of the
00:42high oxygen in our atmosphere produced by photosynthetic life and from microbes that
00:46help catalyze these manganese oxidation reactions however he also says that because we don't yet
00:51have evidence of life on mars or how oxygen would have been produced there this discovery raises as
00:56many questions as it does answers with planetary scientist nina lanza saying the gale lake environment
01:02as revealed by these ancient rocks gives us a window into a habitable environment that looks
01:06surprisingly similar to places on earth today
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