Mount Sharp is made up of layers, with the oldest at the bottom of the mountain and the youngest at the top. Since 2014, the rover has been ascending the foothills of Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain that was once laced with lakes and streams that would have provided a rich environment for microbial life, if any ever formed on the Red Planet.Ĭuriosity Rover Finds New Clues to Mars' Watery Past : NASA’s Curiosity rover recently found surprising clues to Mars’ watery past, including while exploring a region called the “Marker Band.” Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/University of Arizona. “We climbed through thousands of feet of lake deposits and never saw evidence like this – and now we found it in a place we expected to be dry.” ![]() “This is the best evidence of water and waves that we’ve seen in the entire mission,” said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. Billions of years ago, waves on the surface of a shallow lake stirred up sediment at the lake bottom, over time creating rippled textures left in rock. So Curiosity’s team was surprised to discover the mission’s clearest evidence yet of ancient water ripples that formed within lakes. ![]() Over time, the sediment formed into rocks with rippled textures that are the clearest evidence of waves and water that NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has ever found. Rippled Rock Textures: Billions of years ago, waves on the surface of a shallow lake stirred up sediment at the lake bottom.
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