Certainly, if life ever thrived there, manganese oxide would have been the proper catalyst for it. The lead investigator for the ChemCam instrument, Nina Lanza, emphasizes simply how related this Martian setting, the lakebed within the crater, is to Earth.
To her, the Gale Lake, because it’s referred to as, provides a front-row seat to understand an historical, once-livable setting that will most likely remind us of watery locales on Earth.
