NASA Spirit rover data reveals fresh hidden clue that water once covered large parts of Mars

NASA has been continuously searching for signs of ancient life as well as water on the surface of Mars. Now, Professor Paulo de Souza of Edith Cowan University has added fresh evidence to the case that water once covered large parts of Mars. This discovery was made with the help of data from NASA's Spirit rover that was collected more than two decades ago. This adds to the growing body of evidence that Mars was not always the dry planet we see through telescopes and rover cameras today. 

ECU Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research, Professor Paulo de Souza, said in the official statement, "This work shows that important discoveries are not always made by collecting new data. Sometimes they come from looking at existing data with fresh eyes and better analytical techniques." The study has now been published in the journal Interactions by Springer Nature.

What did NASA's Spirit rover data reveal years later?

Professor Paulo de Souza previously worked on NASA's original Mars Exploration Rover mission. To study Mars’ surface, he went back through old readings and found the traces of hematite and altered magnetite in ordinary Martian soil, which typically form when rock spends time in contact with water. De Souza studied readings from 32 different soil sites across Gusev Crater, which were all gathered by Spirit between 2004 and 2010, and combined them into the most detailed iron-mineral profile ever created for typical Martian soil.

Commenting on the research findings, Professor Paulo de Souza said, "One of the most important discoveries was finding crystalline hematite in ordinary Martian soil." Scientists had generally assumed hematite was missing from these particular soils, because Spirit's individual measurements never picked up a strong enough signal to confirm it. De Souza explained, "The original rover observations were limited by time, power and the gradual aging of the instrument used to collect the data. Many measurements were not detailed enough on their own to identify minerals present in very small quantities. By bringing the data together and analysing it in a new way, we were able to reveal information that had been hidden for years."

How does this change what we know about Mars' surface?

Explaining the significance of this study, de Souza said, "This mineral's widespread presence suggests not only that water was present, but that significant areas of Mars may have once been covered by water." NASA Mars Exploration Rover Spirit has already found evidence of water-altered rocks in the Columbia Hills region. Also, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirmed that Gale Crater on Mars held long-lived lakes and streams between 3.8 and 3.3 billion years ago.

As of now, NASA’s Perseverance is searching through an ancient river delta in Jezero Crater to figure out whether the area could once have supported microbial life. “Since leaving Jezero, Perseverance has been exploring a brand-new frontier, both geographically and geologically — a chapter of Martian time that predates the crater itself,” said Ken Farley, Perseverance deputy project scientist at Caltech in Pasadena, California. “On Earth, our earliest geologic history has been fundamentally broken up, deformed, and erased by plate tectonics. Because Mars lacks plate tectonics to recycle its crust, this ancient record remains intact, giving us a rare glimpse into a geological time period that doesn’t exist on our own planet.”

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