The quest to find life on Mars has been gaining momentum in recent years and now NASA have added a new piece to their puzzle...

Scientists have discovered that there has been water on Mars for longer than they formerly thought, meaning life could have existed relatively recently on the planet.

High concentrations of silica - a sediment left by flowing water - were found on the planet by a recent NASA mission and have been reported in the American Geophysical Union's journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Halo-like rings of silica were found in lighter toned bedrock which signifies that Mars has had water for much longer than we thought.

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"The concentration of silica is very high at the centre lines of these halos," Jens Frydenvang, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the University of Copenhagen, and lead author of the study, told The Mirror. "What we're seeing is that silica appears to have migrated between very old sedimentary bedrock and into younger overlying rocks.

"The goal of NASA's Curiosity rover mission has been to find out if Mars was ever habitable, and it has been very successful in showing that Gale crater once held a lake with water that we would even have been able to drink, but we still don't know how long this habitable environment endured."

Unfortunately, the research does not prove if this groundwater could have sustained life on the planet.

From: Country Living UK