Could you imagine sipping a piña colada as you relax on a sandy beach… on Mars?
NASA launched a contest this week for plans to produce food on Mars, located about 140 million miles from the beaches here on Earth. If there is a way to grow plants on the red planet, would it mark a first? Or was there really once life there?
Research does indicate that there may have once been sandy beaches on Mars where there is now apparently just red, dusty terrain. However, there have been some recent setbacks in the plans the U.S. has to study the planet.
Images indicating the presence of coastal areas on Mars came from China’s Zhurong Rover Penetrating Radar on the southern Utopia Planitia, according to a study published last February in the Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences journal. On that plain, researchers observed “subsurface dipping reflectors indicative of an ancient prograding shoreline,” the study said.
“The structure, thickness, and length of the section support voluminous supply of onshore sediments into a large body of water, rather than a merely localized and short-lived melt event,” the study authors explained. “Our findings not only provide support for the existence of an ancient Martian ocean in the northern plains but also offer crucial insights into the evolution of the ancient Martian environment.”
Some of the structures observed could correspond to beach ridges, and “coastal sedimentary deposits formed by ancient ocean waves and possibly composed of sand and pebble gravels transported by tidal currents,” the researchers said. They also noted that “prior data from the radar images recorded by Mars’ Subsurface exploration (RIMFAX) onboard the Perseverance rover also detected dipping reflectors in Jezero Crater.”
“The presence of these deposits requires that a good swath of the planet, at least, was hydrologically active for a prolonged period in order to provide this growing shoreline with water, sediment and potentially nutrients,” said co-author Benjamin Cardenas, an assistant professor of geosciences at The Pennsylvania State University, according to a press release from UC Berkeley. “Shorelines are great locations to look for evidence of past life. It’s thought that the earliest life on Earth began at locations like this, near the interface of air and shallow water.”
While there doesn’t appear to be any bodies of liquid water on Mars today, the planet does have an abundance of ice – mostly made of water – at its poles.
In 2024, a NASA study even indicated that microbes could “find a potential home” beneath this frozen water.
Through the Artemis program, NASA hopes humans will land on Mars in the near future. Yet, at the same time, the space agency’s Mars Sample Return program was effectively cancelled this week when the Senate approved a spending bill, according to LiveScience.
It said that means “best evidence of life on Mars could be trapped in rock samples that NASA no longer has the budget to collect.”
USA Today also reported this week that NASA still hasn’t reconnected with the MAVEN orbiter, one of three spacecraft orbiting Mars, since it went AWOL in December. A Mars solar conjunction that prevented contact between Earth and Mars missions ended Friday and NASA said it would start trying to reestablish the connection again.
According to NASA, “the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) mission is the first mission devoted to understanding the Martian upper atmosphere,” and it launched in 2013. It has also made other discoveries and caught a glimpse of the 3I-ATLAS comet, USA Today said.