NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), launched in 2005, helped scientists determine that Mars had surface water 2 billion years ago. Previous research concluded that water on Mars evaporated about 3 billion years ago, and this new finding dramatically shortens that timeline.

The findings were published last month in AGU Advances. The team made the discovery by studying the chloride salt deposits left behind when ice water evaporates. Salt deposits also provided the first mineral evidence for the existence of liquid water on Mars.
Water has been flowing on Mars for longer than previously thought…a billion years! Findings come from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter data showing that Martian surface water left behind salt minerals 2 billion years ago. https://go.nasa.gov/3o2gTMq
The team used data from an instrument on the MRO spacecraft called the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM). They also used the context camera and the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) color camera on the spacecraft to map the range of chloride salts in the southern hemisphere of Mars.
The salts were found in depressions that were once shallow pools, they wrote.

“It’s amazing that, more than a decade after providing high-resolution imagery, stereo, and infrared data, MRO is driving new discoveries about the nature and timing of these ancient river-connected salt ponds,” corresponding author Bethany L. Eyre Man at the press conference.
“Part of the value of MRO is that over time, we get an increasingly detailed view of Earth,” said Leslie Tamppari, mission associate project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “The more we map the Earth with instruments, the better we can learn about its history.”

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