Photo: NASA/JPL/UArizona
When you look at it now, planet Mars is nothing more than a spinning ball of rock covered in a reddish dust of sorts. It’s as dead as dead gets, and not particularly welcoming. But this isn’t stopping humanity from dreaming to make a second home of the place.
Why is that? Well, dead as it may be, Mars is the only planet in the solar system that has the faintest trace of potential for human colonization. It may not be located, like Earth, in Sol’s Goldilocks Zone, but it’s close enough to make terraforming possible, if we ever develop the tools for such a mammoth undertaking.
More importantly though, Mars is filled with traces of a past that made it incredibly similar to our own planet and possibly even home to some forms of life. We know Mars had water, the key element to supporting life. So much of it, in fact, that probably small seas and larger oceans of the stuff were spread throughout the planet.
It’s very difficult nowadays to determine where those relatively large bodies of water were located, but the Deuteronilus contact of the Isidis Basin, as scientists call the area captured in the main image of this piece is called, is a relatively safe bet.
The Isidis is considered the last major basin to have formed on the planet, close to 4 billion years ago. The Deuteronilus is considered to be the very edge of a large ocean that is supposed to have once been there.
The close-up we have here (the image shows an area less than 3 miles/5 km across), captured by the HiRISE camera back in August 2013 and recently published by NASA, shows just a portion of that contact, an area that might have well been a beautiful beach back in the day when the planet had water, an atmosphere, and who knows, maybe even beach-goers.
More importantly though, Mars is filled with traces of a past that made it incredibly similar to our own planet and possibly even home to some forms of life. We know Mars had water, the key element to supporting life. So much of it, in fact, that probably small seas and larger oceans of the stuff were spread throughout the planet.
It’s very difficult nowadays to determine where those relatively large bodies of water were located, but the Deuteronilus contact of the Isidis Basin, as scientists call the area captured in the main image of this piece is called, is a relatively safe bet.
The Isidis is considered the last major basin to have formed on the planet, close to 4 billion years ago. The Deuteronilus is considered to be the very edge of a large ocean that is supposed to have once been there.
The close-up we have here (the image shows an area less than 3 miles/5 km across), captured by the HiRISE camera back in August 2013 and recently published by NASA, shows just a portion of that contact, an area that might have well been a beautiful beach back in the day when the planet had water, an atmosphere, and who knows, maybe even beach-goers.
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