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At least two-thirds of Mars' surface is more than 3.5 billion years old, and it could have been habitable 4.48 billion years ago, 500 million years before the earliest known Earth lifeforms; [4] Mars may thus hold the best record of the prebiotic conditions leading to life, even if life does not or has never existed there. [5] [6]
You can even collect a fossil trilobite there. However, you cannot visit the Late Ordovician Epoch in the Ordovician Period and collect an actual trilobite. The Earth-based scheme of formal stratigraphic nomenclature has been successfully applied to Mars for several decades now but has numerous flaws.
The composition of Mars covers the branch of the geology of Mars that describes the make-up of the planet Mars. " Hottah " rock outcrop on Mars – ancient streambed [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] viewed by the Curiosity Rover (September 12, 2012, white balanced ) ( raw , close-up , 3-D version ).
Life on Earth may have begun even earlier than biologists suspected, at a time when the solar system was still in its infancy.
Until 2.3 billion years ago, there was no oxygen.” ... “If we’re going to find any sort of fossils on Mars, this is our best guess as to what they would be, because these are the oldest ones ...
Much of the surface of Mars is covered by a thick smooth mantle that is thought to be a mixture of ice and dust. [46] This ice-rich mantle, a few yards thick, smoothes the land. But in places it displays a bumpy texture, resembling the surface of a basketball. Because there are few craters on this mantle, the mantle is relatively young.
A collection of Martian rocks could reveal details about potential past life on the Red Planet – but first NASA has to get them back to Earth. For years, the U.S. space agency's Perseverance ...
Although many geological studies suggest that Mars was habitable in the past, that does not necessarily mean that it was inhabited. Finding fossils of microscopic life of such distant times is an incredibly difficult task, even for Earth's earliest known life forms. Such fossils require a material capable to preserve cellular structures and ...