NASA's Mars Curiosity rover has discovered evidence of an old Martian lake that might have supported microbes called chemolithoautotrophs millions of years ago, according to a report by Space.com.
The lake, which existed approximately 3.7 billion years ago, suggests that habitable environments were present on Mars more recently than previously believed.
"Quite honestly, it just looks very Earth-like," said Curiosity lead scientist John Grotzinger, according to Space.com.
The lake is believed to have covered a 96-mile-wide portion of the Gale Crater, which the Curiosity rover has been researching since reaching Mars in 2012.
The $2.5 billion Curiosity rover was sent to the Red Planet to determine if the Gale Crater could have ever supported microbial life. In March, the rover's team achieved their goal when they revealed that Yellowknife Bay, which is located near the rover's landing site, was habitable billions of years ago.
"You've got an alluvial fan, which is being fed by streams that originate in mountains, that accumulates a body of water," Grotzinger told SPACE.com. "That probably was not unlike what happened during the last glacial maximum in the Western U.S."
The results were reported in six different papers in the journal Science.
Chemolithoautotrophs do not require light to function, as they break down minerals and rocks for energy.
"It is exciting to think that billions of years ago, ancient microbial life may have existed in the lake's calm waters, converting a rich array of elements into energy," Sanjeev Gupta of Imperial College London, co-author of one of the new papers, said in a statement, according to Space.com.
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