NASA's Curiosity Rover Finds Boron Under Ancient Martian Lakebed

With this first ever detection of the element boron in the ancient surface of Mars, researchers are ever more hopeful that the arid Red Planet’s ancient climate was once clement and habitable. Or so report NASA and Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

Boron, an elemental signature of evaporated past water on Earth, is prevalent in now arid regions like Death Valley which straddles the Nevada-California state lines. Yet with this new find by NASA’s Curiosity rover at Mars’ Mount Sharp inside Gale crater, the idea is that the Red Planet’s ancient groundwater was liquid and habitable. Even though the timeframe and exact era of habitability remain up for debate, more and more planetary scientists are coming to the conclusion that Mars may have primed for the evolution of microbial life over timescales of hundreds of millions of years.

“If the boron that we found in calcium sulfate mineral veins on Mars is similar to what we see on Earth, it would indicate that the groundwater of ancient Mars would have been [32-140 degrees Fahrenheit] with neutral-to-alkaline ph,” Patrick Gasda, a postdoctoral researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, said in a statement.

The Los Alamos lab also noted that the temperature, pH factor, and dissolved mineral content of the groundwater could make it habitable

As the lab noted, the boron was identified by Curiosity’s laser-shooting Chemistry and Camera (Chemcam) instrument, developed at Los Alamos in conjunction with CNES, the French space agency.

Boron, a very water soluble element, likely retreated with ancient water from a lake near the rover’s current area of exploration at Mars’ Gale Crater and into the subsurface.

This water had to have been lukewarm, notes Gasda, in an explanatory video. He explains that the boron also tells us that it was not overly acidic or alkaline so normal organisms could have lived there.

The researchers speculate that Gale Crater formed at a time when Mars was wet and a lake subsequently formed inside the crater. Some time later, that lake disappeared and the crater itself was buried by sediments.

As for why boron was detected at this particular spot?

It could be that the drying out of part of Gale Lake resulted in a boron-containing deposit in an overlying layer, not yet reached by Curiosity, the lab reports. Or it could be that changes in the chemistry of clay-bearing deposits and groundwater, the lab reports, affected how boron was picked up and dropped off within the local sediments.

Even so, such an ancient sedimentary basin would be a veritable chemical reactor , Caltech geochemist and planetary scientist John Grotzinger notes in a statement.

“We are seeing chemical complexity indicating a long, interactive history with the water,” Grotzinger notes. “ The more complicated the chemistry is, the better it is for habitability.”