China’s Zhurong rover has found evidence of liquid water on Mars. The discovery could provide “key clues for the future search for life.”
The Chinese Zhurong rover has discovered evidence that liquid water has existed on the red planet for the past 1.4 million years, suggesting that present-day Mars may not be as inhospitably dry as previously thought. Since water is the essential ingredient for life on Earth, the new findings have important implications for the ongoing search for life on Mars.
More than three billion years ago, Mars was home to mighty rivers and huge lakes that could have provided the right conditions for simple life forms, such as microbes. But the planet has lost most of its atmosphere since that golden age, becoming a desiccated shell with a surface exposed to highly damaging radiation.
NASA’s Curiosity rover has shown that Mars was habitable in the past , and its successor, Perseverance, is currently searching for soil samples that may preserve fossilized signs of Martian life. While those missions have produced revelations about Mars’ deep past, Zhurong has now revealed that the planet may have experienced periods of wetness in its recent history.
Since landing in 2021, Zhurong has traveled nearly 2km across a Martian region called Utopia Planitia , though it has been dormant for nearly a year after it was placed into hibernation to protect it from winter conditions and a major sandstorm. .
While it’s unclear whether the rover will ever wake up, its tantalizing images reveal features in Martian dunes that “were most likely associated with saline water activity, indicating the existence of a water process in the low-latitude region of Mars” that may have occurred as recently as 400,000 years ago,” reports a study published Friday in Science Advances .
According to the study, led by Xiaoguang Qin , a professor at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics (IGG) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS):
“Is there recently liquid water on the contemporary surface of Mars? This question is critical to understanding the recent climate evolution of the polar caps, the habitable environment, and even the potential for life on Mars. We report bright polygonal crusts, cracks, aggregates and ridges on the surfaces of hydrated salt-rich dunes of southern Utopia Planitia (~25°N) from in situ exploration by the Zhurong rover. Wind and CO2 freezing processes can be ruled out as potential mechanisms. Instead, the involvement of saline water from thawing frost/snow is the most likely cause.”