NASA\u2019s curiosity rover made an unexpected and exciting discovery when it arrived at the \u201csulfate-bearing unit\u201d of Mars: rippled rock textures that indicate lakes once existed in this supposedly dry region.
\nAccording to international media reports, researchers expected to find salty minerals leftover from water drying up; instead, they uncovered evidence that these regions were wet for much longer than previously thought. Who knows what other secrets lie hidden beneath the Red Planet\u2019s dusty surface?
\nAfter its successful mission, the Curiosity team was astounded to uncover a snapshot of Mars\u2019 distant past: evidence that ancient lakes once existed and lapped at sandy shores.
\nBillions of years ago, waves created patterns in sediment beneath Martian lakes \u2013 leaving ripples etched into the rock for researchers to discover today.
\n\u201cThis is the best evidence of water and waves that we\u2019ve seen in the entire mission,\u201d said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity\u2019s project scientist at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. \u201cWe climbed through thousands of feet of lake deposits and never saw evidence like this \u2013 and now we found it in a place we expected to be dry.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
NASA\u2019s curiosity rover made an unexpected and exciting discovery when it arrived at the \u201csulfate-bearing unit\u201d of Mars: rippled rock textures that indicate lakes once…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4785,"comment_status":"registered_only","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4784","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4784","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4784"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4784\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}