Scientists have been eagerly and relentlessly searching for signs of water on Mars. Now, new findings suggest that the Red Planet was not only covered by water in the past. The water was there for a long time and may have supported life similar to that on Earth.

In certain locations on Mars, rocks contain minerals which show evidence that water was once there. Researchers from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., zeroed in on these locations. To do this, they employed several instruments on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft, including an instrument called the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars, or CRISM.

Specifically, the scientists looked for claylike minerals called phyllosilicates (pronounced FI-low-sill-ee-cates) that form only when water is around. Researchers had already identified a few types of these minerals at about 100 places on Mars. But CRISM is much more sensitive than previous tools. It allowed the scientists to detect a large variety of phyllosilicates at thousands of locations across a part of Mars called the southern highlands.

Based on where they found the claylike minerals in the planet’s rocky layers, the team suspects that water flowed on Mars early in the solar system’s history, between 4.6 billion and 3.8 billion years ago.

“Finding all these different water-based minerals at all these locations really blows the doors off Mars research,” says University of Paris’ Joseph Michalski, a Mars researcher who was not involved in the study. Whether life existed at any of these sites is an unanswered question that scientists may not be able to answer for many years.

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