Ten years ago, NASA's Curiosity Mars rover successfully commenced its mission to explore the possibility of life on mars. Here's what it has discovered:
Ten years ago, engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab celebrated the successful landing of its fourth robot on Mars, The Curiosity rover.
Engineers work on a model of the Mars rover Curiosity at the Spacecraft Assembly Facility at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 2012. Dr. Ashwin Vasavada is the head scientist of the Curiosity team, and says that the mission was a huge success. "We've explored Mars enough to know that there are no dinosaur footprints, no big life forms around today," he said."So if life ever did take hold, it probably never got beyond kind of a microbial stage."So, what kind of life was there on Mars? And was there any specific event that made it uninhabitable for life?"You can see evidence that rivers once coursed along the surface, that maybe even an ocean existed at one point.
"Ultimately, it's a smaller planet than Earth, [so] that allowed it to cool faster. Once it cooled faster, it lost its ability to generate a magnetic field," he said."Once the magnetic field stopped, the atmosphere was stripped away by radiation in space. And that led to its inability to, at that point, stay warm and have liquid water."A unique landing point
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