Astrum Space - We Finally Have Evidence of Ancient Oceans on Mars

Episode Date: September 18, 2025

China’s Zhurong rover has found evidence of ancient oceans on Mars.Mars might once have had the most beautiful beaches in our solar system. For decades, the idea of ancient Martian oceans has been a theory, but now, a stunning new discovery has changed everything. The Zhurong rover has uncovered the first definitive proof of a long-lost ocean on Mars, complete with waves and tides. This discovery is fundamentally reshaping our understanding of the Red Planet, and could finally guide us to where we might find signs of life beyond Earth.▀▀▀▀▀▀Get NordVPN 2Y plan + 4 months extra ➼ https://nordvpn.com/astrum. It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee!▀▀▀▀▀▀Astrum's newsletter has launched! Want to know what's happening in space? Sign up here: ⁠https://astrumspace.kit.com⁠A huge thanks to our Patreons who help make these videos possible. Sign-up here: ⁠https://bit.ly/4aiJZNF

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Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Earth is home to the most stunning beaches in the solar system. But 3.6 billion years ago, Mars might have given us a run for our money. Imagine standing on a rust red shore at dusk, gentle tides lapping around.

your ankles. The dark water stretches out to the horizon. For a second, it reminds you of your home planet, until you look up and spot not one, but two moons in the twilight sky, Phobos and Demos. But the idea that Mars has oceans isn't new. It's been a popular theory for decades. However, so far, most of our findings have come from indirect observations of Mars. Over the years, this is a given rise to multiple interpretations of the data, leading some scientists to reject the Mars Ocean theory entirely. Earlier this year, researchers unveiled a groundbreaking discovery a few years in the making. It didn't come from NASA or ESA, but from the China National Space Administration's Tsurong Rover. What it found out could silence these skeptics forever, fundamentally changing

our understanding of Martian evolution and guiding us to the best place to hunt for signs of alien life. I'm Alex McColgan and you're watching Astrum. Join me today as we dive into China's landmark mission to Mars, the remarkable data into rover uncovered and what this means for the search for life beyond Earth. Water is the most precious material in the world. It covers 70% of our planet, and makes up 60% of our bodies. It courses through rivers, fills seas, lakes and ponds, and is necessary for all life as we know it. Yet for a molecule so abundant on Earth, it's surprisingly scarce in our solar system. When it comes to Mars, we know it had water as far back as 4.45 billion years ago, thanks to evidence from crystals hidden within a Martian meteorite that could have only formed in the

presence of hot, water-rich fluids. Martian dust has also been found to contain ferrihydride, a mineral that only forms in the presence of water. We've also found evidence for ancient rivers and polar ice covering an area similar to the US. Some resilient forms of Martian life could be preserved deep within these ice caps, but a shoreline could have supported an abundance of life, possibly in entire diverse ecosystems. And they might have left behind biosignatures, like scavenger hunt clues we can use to paint a picture of Mars' ancient coastal habitats. Shore environments offer key advantages to budding life. They concentrate organic molecules through evaporation, promote the formation of complex molecules like RNA and protein, and provide mineral-rich surfaces and energy

sources, like UV radiation, heat, and chemical gradients, all of which can drive the chemistry needed for life to arise. In contrast, rivers are too dynamic and dilute to support the delicate chemical conditions needed for life to arise. They constantly flushed materials downstream, making it difficult for molecules to accumulate and react the way they need to to form life. So if researchers could find evidence of a standing body of water on Mars, like a lake or an ocean, they'd be in a much better spot to search for remnants of microbial life. Now, the Chinese Tianwen-one-one mission might have just captured the most compelling evidence yet for ancient oceans on Mars.

It's the first on-the-ground data ever collected of a suspected ocean zone. and it makes a strong case that our shoreline theory is on the right track. On the 23rd of July 2020, the Tianwen-1 spacecraft began its 202 day journey to Mars. Aboard, it carried an orbiter, lander, and the Tsurong Rover. The aim of the mission was to investigate Mars' geology, climate, and habitability through three key activities. By studying the surface and subsurface of the Utopia Planitia, a region scientist think could be an ancient ocean basin based on mapping from satellite data, by performing climate and weather monitoring, including magnetic field variations and dust activities affect on solar panels and climate. And by searching for signs of water and habitability, investigating whether the region harbored conditions suitable for life in the past. On the 10th of February 2021, Tianwen 1 entered into orbit around Mars.

Controllers spent three months testing the probe systems, shifting its orbital path from equatorial to polar and preparing it for its main science mission. Finally, on the 14th of May, the lander touched down on the red planet, and a week later, the Tsurong rover was successfully deployed, making China only the second nation in history to successfully deploy a rover on Mars, behind the USA. For China, this mission represented more than just scientific discovery. It showcased their spaceflight capabilities and autonomy, and demonstrated they can launch and operate missions without relying on foreign navigation

or communication systems. The Tianwen mission, meaning questions to heaven, laid the foundation for future Chinese missions like a Mars sample return and a possible crude mission to Mars by 2030. The 240 kilogram rover was deployed in a region of Mars known as Utopia Planitia, the largest known impact basin in the whole solar system. It's the same region where the NASA Viking missions landed almost 50 years ago, but recently interest in this area was revived due to a 2016 NASA discovery. Turns out, it is home to a massive amount of underground ice, about as much water as you'd find in Lake Superior,

about 12,100 kilometres cubed, or 1 times 10 to the power 16 litres. So, to study this promising region, the Tsurong Rover came equipped with 13 different scientific payloads, which can be thought of as four categories. radars, to detect subsurface structures up to 100 metres underground, including the ground-penetrating Roper radar, spectrometers to analyze soil and rock compositions, including a laser-induced breakdown and infrared spectrometer, optical cameras that will image the planet from both the orbiter and the rover, as well as provide topography and navigation capabilities, and monitors for atmosphere and space environments,

that will detect the magnetic field, space radiation, and the climate of Mars, including a surface magnetometer and the Mars Climate Station, designed to monitor local temperature, wind, pressure, and even record sound. The rover also carried a deployable wireless selfie camera that produced some of the mission's most iconic images, like these. Tsurong selfies safely traveled hundreds of. millions of kilometers through open space as a radio transmission. When they arrived on Earth, scientists knew how to decode the radio signals into the colorful image we see before us. Yet,

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and up to speed from anywhere in the world. Right now you can get four extra months free with their two-year plan. Just scan this QR code or head to NordVPN.com forward slash Astrum to get started. There's even a 30-day money-back guarantee so you've got nothing to lose. Thanks NordVPN for sponsoring this channel. Let's get back to our little rover. So loaded up with all the scientific payloads, what exactly did Zerong discover about the Martian coastline that past missions had missed? To fully understand this, we need a quick geography lesson. On earth, sediment particles are transported by wind, water and ice, carried through rivers or moved downhill by glaciers. This sediment is eventually deposited in low-energy environments, like river deltas, lake and ocean floors, floodplains,

and the base of hills or mountains. But it can also happen along coastlines, more specifically along the part of the beach known as the foreshore. This is a dynamic part of the shoreline between the high tide and low tide lines. Here sediment can be added or removed depending on things like wind, tides, weather events, and the type and size of sediment particles. On Earth, the foreshore zone tends to slope gently towards the sea. The gradient of the slope depends on the type of sediment.

For example, beaches made of smaller, finer particles result in low gradient beaches, while beaches with cobbles may be stacked as steep as 20 degrees. These sloping layers record the long-term balance between sediment supply, wave energy, and water level, and can be preserved in the geological record for millions of years. Back on Mars, the Tsirong rover was hard at work studying the planet's subsurface topography. It did this by sending radio waves into the ground using its roper radar. When the radio wave hits a boundary between two different materials, for example, when the composition shifts from fine-grained sediment to coarse a sand, the signal bounces back.

This creates a reflector in the radar image. What grabbed the Turoong's team's attention was not just that signals were bouncing back, but the angle they were bouncing back at. All 76 of the geological reflectors they encountered sloped in the same direction at an angle between 6 and 20 degrees. Putting the pieces together, the team realized that 10 to 35 meters below the planet, surface lies a 1.3 kilometre stretch of terrain sloping towards the lowlands. It seemed like more than coincidence. Could this be proof of what they were looking for? The indisputable evidence

for an ancient shoreline on Mars. The team hurried to compare this Martian picture to the buried beaches found on Earth and found the Bay of Bengal to be such a strikingly similar Earth Analog, they even featured this finding in their paper. One of the co-authors of the original research paper that published the findings said, it's a simple structure, but it tells you there had to be waves, there had to be a nearby river supplying sediment, and all these things had to be active for some extended period of time. We also know that the Sun and Mars' bigger moon, Phobos, do affect the planet's surface gravity, which could have caused tides on the ancient ocean.

The team briefly considered, but ultimately ruled out other possible explanations for the sloping structures. They argued both sand dunes and lava flows would lead to slopes pointing in multiple directions, yet in the Tsurong data, all the reflectors point the same way. They concluded that these slopes were more consistent with a coastal foreshore environment, strengthening the case, that Mars once had dynamic shorelines that experienced tides, wind and waves, just like Earth does today. For decades, scientists have been locked in heated debate over the question of Mars' oceans. The evidence seemed frustratingly unclear. Prominent researchers dismissed shoreline evidence as artefacts or poor image resolution, and climate modelers struggle to explain how liquid water could

exist on an early Mars with a fainter sun. You see, 3.5 billion years ago, our sun was about 25% dimmer than it is now, too faint to keep Mars above freezing. And yet, our climate models predict that at the time Mars would have been covered in rivers, lakes, and even oceans. This leads to what is known as the Faint Young Sun Paradox. If the heat for liquid water didn't come from the sun, it must have come from Mars's atmosphere. This has led to three theories trying to solve the faint young sun paradox.

The first says Mars was warm and wet. The idea is that Mars's atmosphere was loaded with greenhouse gases, mainly carbon dioxide and water vapor, which made it so dense it could trap enough heat to allow liquid water to persist for millions of years. This would explain the evidence pointing to rainfall, lakes, and oceans. But the problem is, according to our models, carbon dioxide and water vapor alone can't produce the warming needed for this scenario. Other gases like methane, ammonia, or hydrogen would be needed, but they are unstable and hard to maintain long term. The second possibility is that Mars was only warm and wet some of the time, mainly in response to major events like

massive volcanic eruptions or asteroid impacts. These could release huge amounts of heat or greenhouse gases, creating long-lived warm spells, where ice melted, rivers flowed, and erosion occurred. But we can't know for sure if the intensity and frequency of these spells would have been enough to carve all the valleys and fill the lakes we see evidence for today. And finally, some think Mars spent most of its history as a frozen ball. Landscapes were dominated by snow and ice, but under certain conditions, like changes in Mars's orbit or sudden heating events, the ice melted. This explains why Mars shows signs of both glacier activity and flowing water, but what could have melted all that ice often enough for the erosion

we see to occur. None of these three scenarios perfectly explain Mars' past climate. Frustratingly, despite the strong evidence for shorelines, we still don't know how to reframe our models of Mars' early climate, to allow for water to persist there. Solving the faint young sun paradox may be the key to understanding whether Mars was ever truly habitable. So, it's too soon to get carried away, imagining some billionaire, digging up Martian beaches and turning them into resorts. The truth is, we still need more data to put the full puzzle together. NASA was planning to launch a sample return mission sometime in 2007 or 2008, with a return scheduled for the early 2030s. This would give us more clarity into the planet's complex ancient geology,

and perhaps close the debate for good. But uncertainty around NASA's budget has pushed the sample return until 2040, with recent proposed cuts putting it at risk of being cancelled altogether. Even though Tsurong was only designed to last 93 Earth days, it persisted well beyond this timeline, collecting data for an impressive 358 days until it went dormant on the 20th of May 2020. With appropriate temperature and sunlight conditions, Surong was expected to wake up in December 2022, but never did due to excess dust accumulation. As we look to the future, more questions remain to be answered.

If Mars had stable oceans for millions of years, what happened to all that water? How did the planet transition from a potentially habitable world to the frozen desert we see today? Could a similar fate await Earth? And if life did emerge in these ancient coastal environments, could traces of it still exist, buried beneath the surface? Only time and another exciting mission to our red neighbour will tell.

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