The paper, published in the prestigious journal Science, reveals that data from three of Curiosity’s drill sites had siderite, an iron carbonate material, within sulfate-rich layers of Mount Sharp in Gale Crater.
“I wrote this paper while I was a Visiting Fellow at Trinity Hall and truly would not have been able to ‘connect the dots’ to place the discovery of a carbon cycle on ancient Mars in its proper context without the time and intellectual curiosity that Trinity Hall encourages in its Fellows,” says Dr Tutolo.
“As we discuss in the paper, models have been predicting that carbonate minerals should be widespread across the surface of Mars for many decades. Yet, there had been no clear evidence of the presence of these important minerals until the Curiosity rover drilled into an intriguing section of sedimentary rocks in 2023. In my early days as a Visiting Fellow, I would go to Trinity Hall for lunch and sit in the Senior Common Room (SCR) for the remaining hours of the afternoon reading and re-reading the seminal papers that had predicted the presence of these minerals on the Martian surface over a cup (or many) of tea. Although I’d read all of these papers before, I didn’t truly understand their implications until that fall spent in the SCR after lunch.
“All this time spent at Trinity Hall also led to my becoming much better acquainted with the Fellowship, and I’m truly glad for it. I will always fondly remember Trinity Hall as a vital contributor to the production of this paper and only wish I could be blessed with similar opportunities throughout the rest of my career.”
NASA says the discovery of carbonate suggests that the ancient Martian atmosphere contained enough carbon dioxide to support liquid water on the planet’s surface. As the atmosphere thinned, that carbon dioxide transformed into rock form.
Future missions and analysis, it says, could confirm the findings and help scientists better understand the planet’s early history and how it transforms as its atmosphere is lost.
The scientists involved are ultimately trying to determine whether Mars was ever capable of supporting life — and the latest discovery brings them closer to an answer.
