(The Register) Photographs of rocks taken by NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars may well confirm that life as we know it once existed on the Red Planet.
The pictures were shot at the Gillespie Lake outcrop in Yellowknife Bay, which used to be a huge lake back when Mars had surface water. Dr Nora Noffke, who has spent 20 years studying fossils of early microbes, said formations in the Martian rocks looked very similar to those found on Earth – formations created by microorganisms.
"In one image, I saw something that looked very familiar," Noffke told Astrobiology Magazine. "So I took a closer look, meaning I spent several weeks investigating certain images centimetre by centimetre, drawing sketches, and comparing them to data from terrestrial structures."
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