{"id":540599,"date":"2025-01-14T09:57:37","date_gmt":"2025-01-14T12:57:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/?p=540599"},"modified":"2025-01-14T09:57:37","modified_gmt":"2025-01-14T12:57:37","slug":"mars-was-like-earth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/mars-was-like-earth\/","title":{"rendered":"Mars was like Earth"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_540488\" style=\"max-width: 1150px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright vertical\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-540488 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/RPF-notas-marte-manganes-2024-07-1140.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1140\" height=\"630\" srcset=\"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/RPF-notas-marte-manganes-2024-07-1140.jpg 1140w, https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/RPF-notas-marte-manganes-2024-07-1140-250x138.jpg 250w, https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/RPF-notas-marte-manganes-2024-07-1140-700x387.jpg 700w, https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/RPF-notas-marte-manganes-2024-07-1140-120x66.jpg 120w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1140px) 100vw, 1140px\" \/><p class=\"wp-caption-text\"><span class=\"media-credits-inline\">LANL<\/span>Curiosity detected manganese oxide on the surface of the Red Planet<span class=\"media-credits\">LANL<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n<p>Sedimentary rocks rich in manganese oxide, identified by one of the devices on the Curiosity rover, suggest that Mars may once have had an oxygen-rich atmosphere and in its early history, it might have been more similar to Earth and more conducive to life than previously thought. The discovery is intriguing because known forms of manganese oxide indicate an abundance of oxygen or microbial life \u2014 and neither has ever been detected on the Red Planet. When digested by microorganisms, manganese oxide \u2014 which was abundant in Earth&#8217;s rocks and oceans around 4 billion years ago, before the first forms of life emerged \u2014 leads to an accumulation of oxygen, essential to most living beings. \u201cWe did not expect to find manganese oxide in such high concentrations,\u201d said Patrick Gasda of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), USA, in a statement. Gasda&#8217;s team believes the rocks may have been left in the region by water from an extinct river slowing down as it entered the Gale Crater, an ancient lakebed 154 kilometers wide; the process would likely have been similar to how manganese oxide-rich rocks ended up on the shores of shallow lakes on Earth. Another possibility is that the manganese oxide was formed from chemical elements such as chlorine and bromine, abundant during the early formation of Mars, which could convert manganese dissolved in water into manganese oxide minerals (LANL and<em> Journal of Geophysical Research Planets<\/em>, May 1; <em>LiveScience<\/em>, May 6).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rocks collected by Curiosity rover suggest Mars may have been more like Earth in the past","protected":false},"author":475,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1651],"tags":[259,240],"coauthors":[785],"class_list":["post-540599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-notes","tag-chemistry","tag-geology"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/475"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=540599"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540599\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":540600,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540599\/revisions\/540600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=540599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=540599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=540599"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=540599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}