Good life on Mars? Planet had 'vacation-style' beaches

A team of international researchers has analysed data collected by Chinese Mars rover Zhurong and found evidence suggesting the red planet once featured beaches, oceans with waves and wind.

Researchers from US and Chinese universities studied data collected by the Zhurong, which landed in an area of Mars known as Utopia Planitia in 2021.

The rover was deployed to look for signs of ancient water or ice on the planet, and collected data on the geology of its surroundings using low and high-frequency radar.

"We're finding places on Mars that used to look like ancient beaches and ancient river deltas," said study co-author Benjamin Cardenas, assistant professor of geology at US university Penn State.

"We found evidence for wind, waves, no shortage of sand - a proper, vacation-style beach."

"Various observations suggest that large amounts of liquid water once existed on the Martian surface, however, the nature and fate of this water are uncertain," the researchers write in the Proceedings of the US National Academy of Sciences in a paper published on Monday.

"This finding implies the past existence of a large water body, supporting the hypothesis of a past ocean in the northern plains of Mars," they continue.

Cardenas said the data revealed underground sedimentary deposits with a similar layered structure to Earth's beaches, including deposits sloping down as if towards oceans.

"This stood out to us immediately because it suggests there were waves, which means there was a dynamic interface of air and water," Cardenas said, adding that the discovery supports the hypothesis that that a large ocean once covered a large portion of the northern pole of Mars.

Michael Manga from University of California, Berkeley, said the Zhurong's "ground-penetrating radar gives us a view of the subsurface of the planet, which allows us to do geology that we could have never done before."

"All these incredible advancements in technology have made it possible to do basic science that is revealing a trove of new information about Mars."