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PASADENA, Calif. — NASA says its Curiosity rover started picking up distinct patterns in the rocks as it approached Mount Sharp on Mars.
At the time researchers believed the tilted forms were remnants of streams emptying into a larger bed of water, and NASA announced Monday that it now has additional evidence to indicate Mars was once home to many long-lasting lakes.
Researchers have long puzzled over why Mount Sharp, which is about 3 miles tall, sits in a crater and has hundreds of rock layers.
"We are making headway in solving the mystery of Mount Sharp," Curiosity project scientist John Grotzinger said in a statement. "Where there's now a mountain, there may have once been a series of lakes."
The rover is currently examining the Murray formation, which comprises the lowest sedimentary layers of Mount Sharp and is where rivers repeatedly deposited various sands and silt, according to NASA.
"The great thing about a lake that occurs repeatedly, over and over, is that each time it comes back it is another experiment to tell you how the environment works," Grotzinger said. "As Curiosity climbs higher on Mount Sharp, we will have a series of experiments to show patterns in how the atmosphere and the water and the sediments interact. We may see how the chemistry changed in the lakes over time. This is a hypothesis supported by what we have observed so far, providing a framework for testing in the coming year."
Research from Curiosity is being used to plan a human mission to Mars in the 2030s, according to NASA.
