BORON DETECTION POINTS TO PAST LIFE ON MARS.

NASA's Curiosity rover has detected boron for the first time on the surface of Mars, which indicates that the ground water may have possibly been suitable for hosting microbial life in the past. "If the boron that we found in calcium sulphate mineral veins on Mars is similar to what we see on Earth, it would indicate that the ground water of ancient Mars that formed these veins would have been 0-60 degrees celsius and neutral-to-alkaline pH", said Patrick Gasda, a post-doctoral researcher  at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The temperature, pH, and dissolved mineral content of the ground water could make it habitable. The Boron, mainly associated with arid sites where much water has evaporated away, was identified by the rover's Chemcam instrument. Scientists are considering at least two possibilities for the source of Boron: It could be that the drying out of part of Gale lake resulted in a boron-containing deposit in an overlying layer. Some of the material from this layer could have later been carried by ground water down into fractures in the rocks. The changes in the chemistry of clay-bearing deposits and ground water may have affected how boron was picked up and dropped off within the local sediments.
The discovery of boron is only one of several recent findings related to the composition of Martian rocks. Curiosity is climbing a layered Martian mountain in search of rock-composition evidence of how ancient lakes and wet underground environments changed billions of years ago, in ways that affected their favourability for microbial life.
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