Six Cool Takeaways From NASA's Mars Rover Curiosity Discoveries
Some big discoveries are being made on the red planet.
Early Mars, it has become increasingly apparent, was in many important ways similar to Earth. (See also "Did Life on Earth Come From Mars?")
"If you put together all that we're learning about Gale Crater and Mars, you really begin to chip away the rock and the sculpture inside emerges," said Pan Conrad, an astrobiologist with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and a co-author on several of the papers.
As described in the six Science papers, that hidden but slowly materializing landscape looks something like this:
After concluding that rivers and streams once flowed into Gale Crater, the Curiosity team has now reported that a lake existed there as well. That surface water, as well as groundwater that likely went down
