‘Smiley face’ crater on Mars could hold signs of life, scientists say

Published Sep 15, 2024  •  2 minute read

The European Space Agency captured this photo of a smiley-face-shaped salt deposit on Mars. Photo by SCREEN GRAB /ESA

The fourth planet from the sun appears to be having fun.

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Astronomers have discovered a smiley face-shaped structure on Mars and researchers believe that it might indicate signs of past life on the Red Planet.

The grinning formation is made up of a pair of crater eyes as well as rings of ancient salt deposits.

The deposits are the remains of a long-ago dried-up ancient body of water, which left behind the emoji-life remnant that is only visible when viewed with an infrared camera.

The European Space Agency (ESA) captured the photo.

“These deposits, remnants of ancient water bodies, could indicate habitable zones from billions of years ago,” the ESA said, per the U.K. Daily Mail.

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Scientists aren’t sure how big the smiley face is, but it is one of 965 other salt deposits recently catalogued on Mars’ surface that range from 1,000 to 10,000 feet in size.

Salt deposits are accumulations of salt or chloride found on a planetary surface. On Mars, they’re remnants of ancient bodies of water that dried up when the planet underwent a climatic shift eons ago.

The ESA said before the last puddles of Mars’ liquid water disappeared, they may have been a “haven” for microbial life.

The puddles would have been extremely salty and the remains of microbes that once lived in them might still be preserved to this day, hiding in deposits such as this smiley face.

The ESA captured the image using their ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, a measuring device in use since 2016.

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Salt deposits on Mars’ surface are typically invisible.

The photo was published as part of a study in the journal Scientific Data.

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The research team used images taken by the orbiter to create the most robust catalog of Mars’ chloride salt deposits to date, about 1,000 of them painting a picture of ancient Mars much different than the desert planet as it’s known today.

“In the distant past, water formed magnificent landforms such as riverbeds, channels, and deltas on the Red Planet,” said planetary scientist and study lead author Valentin Bickel in an ESA statement.

Studies suggest that sometime between two billion and three billion years ago, severe climate change caused these bodies of water to dry up.

Studying Mars’ ancient water bodies could reveal clues about ancient microbial life that once lived in the planet’s liquid water, the study said.

“The new data has important implications for our understanding of the distribution of water on early Mars, as well as its past climate and habitability,” Bickel said.

While there isn’t conclusive evidence pointing to past or present life on Mars, the study adds to a growing body of research in the search for microbes on the Red Planet.

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