By Will DunhamWASHINGTON (Reuters) – With the assistance of China’s Zhurong rover, scientists have gathered fresh evidence that Mars was home to an ocean billions of years ago – a far cry from the dry and desolate world it is today.Scientists said on Thursday that data obtained by Zhurong, which landed in the northern lowlands of Mars in 2021, and by orbiting spacecraft indicated the presence of geological features indicative of an ancient coastline. The rover analyzed rock on the Martian surface in a location called Utopia Planitia, a large plain in the planet’s northern hemisphere.The researchers said data from China’s Tianwen-1 Orbiter, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and the robotic six-wheeled rover indicated the existence of a water ocean during a period when Mars might already have become cold and dry and lost much of its atmosphere.They described surface features such as troughs, sediment channels and mud volcano formations indicative of a coastline, with evidence of both shallow and deeper marine environments.”We estimate the flooding of the Utopia Planitia on Mars was approximately 3.68 billion years ago. The ocean surface was likely frozen in a geologically short period,” said Hong Kong Polytechnic University planetary scientist Bo Wu, lead author of the study published in the journal Sci …
