NASA has uncovered evidence that strange alien lakes once existed on Mars.
On Wednesday, the US space agency unveiled clues that point to Mars’ watery past.
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The evidence can be found in a landscape of rocks that feature a ripple design.
Nasa’s Curiosity rover, which has been on Mars since August 2012, can be credited with the discovery.
“This is the best evidence of water and waves that we’ve seen in the entire mission,” said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
“We climbed through thousands of feet of lake deposits and never saw evidence like this – and now we found it in a place we expected to be dry.”
In a statement on Wednesday, Nasa noted that the ripple effect was created billions of years ago when waves on the surface of a shallow lake stirred up sediment at the lake bottom.
Curiosity is currently exploring Gale Crater to determine if the area could have supported life eons ago.
Since 2014, the rover has been ascending the foothills of Mount Sharp, which forms the central peak within the Gale crater.
Nasa believes the area was once “laced with lakes and streams that would have provided a rich environment for microbial life – if any ever formed on the Red Planet.”
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And because Mount Sharp is made up of layers, with the oldest at the bottom of the mountain, as Curiosity goes up, it’s looking at how Mars evolved.
“The wave ripples, debris flows, and rhythmic layers all tell us that the story of wet-to-dry on Mars wasn’t simple,” Vasavada said.
“Mars’ ancient climate had a wonderful complexity to it, much like Earth’s.”
Curiosity has been exploring Mars for many years, but it’s not the only Nasa rover on the Red Planet.
Perseverance is searching for past life in the Jezero Crater and collecting soil and rock samples to be studied on Earth.
In December, Perseverance collected and dropped off the first-ever Martian sample from the Red Planet.
The rover will also help to prepare for future human exploration, NASA said.
The titanium tube is currently resting on the Red Planet’s surface after being placed there on December 21, per NASA.
Over the next two months, the rover will deposit 10 tubes at the same location, dubbed “Three Forks.”
This is to build humanity’s first sample depot on another planet.
