In the next decade, it’s likely that we’ll see humans on Mars, with both NASA and SpaceX planning crewed missions to the Red Planet for the 2030s.

In the meantime, plenty of data is being transmitted back to our home planet from uncrewed Mars missions.

NASA’s Perseverance Rover, for example, has been capturing images, data, and collecting rock samples from the Martian surface since its arrival in 2021.

Before it, the Curiosity Rover tackled Mars’s dusty terrain from 2012, whilst China’s Zhurong Rover also arrived on Mars in 2021.

So just because people aren’t on Mars yet, doesn’t mean that frequent discoveries aren’t being made about our planetary neighbor; in fact, a recent study from scientists at Georgia Tech has identified clues about Mars’s potential volcanism.

The research involves the Jezero Crater, where Perseverance is currently engaged in collecting data and rock samples.

In the research paper, which was recently published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, the team show that a mountain known as Jezero Mons, which sits on the edge of the crater, is volcanic.

The research, led by Sara C. Cuevas-Quiñones, is furthering suspicions by previous researchers that the mountain could be volcanic.

And as Georgia Tech Professor James J. Wray – one of those scientists holding the prior suspicions, and who worked on the project with Cuevas-Quiñones – explained in a statement, understanding potential sites of volcanism on Mars could have fascinating implications for our future scientific endeavours:

“Volcanism on Mars is intriguing for a number of reasons — from the implications it has on habitability, to better constraining the geologic history. Jezero Crater is one of the best studied sites on Mars. If we are just now identifying a volcano here, imagine how many more could be on Mars. Volcanoes may be even more widespread across Mars than we thought.”

To truly understand the potential volcanism of Jezero Mons, the researchers assembled a multidisciplinary team and gathered a wide range of data sources to fully understand the rocks and the terrain.

They then compared the data to our knowledge of volcanoes on Earth, as Wray continued:

“We can’t visit Mars and definitively prove that Jezero Mons is a volcano, but we can show that it shares the same properties with existing volcanoes — both here on Earth and Mars. We used data from the Mars Odyssey Orbiter, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, and Perseverance Rover, all in combination to puzzle this out.”

Their findings, which combine images of Jezero Mons and its terrain with the igneous rock samples that Perseverance collected, suggest that – once upon a time at least – Mars was heated by volcanoes, with active adjacent water sources at places like Jezero crater. All this, as Wray continued to explain, is very exciting in the context of potential life in space:

“The coalescence of these two types of systems makes Jezero more interesting than ever,” shares Wray. “We have samples of incredible sedimentary rocks that could be from a habitable region alongside igneous rocks with important scientific value. Mars is the best place we have to look in our solar system for signs of life, and thanks to the Perseverance Rover collecting samples in Jezero, the United States has samples from the best rocks in the best place on Mars. If these samples are returned to Earth, we can do incredible, groundbreaking science with them.”

It’s hard to avoid catching Wray’s enthusiasm.

After all, if hydrothermal energy and water sources were once active on Mars, there’s more evidence than ever that life was possible on its surface.

If you think that’s impressive, check out this story about a “goldmine” of lithium that was found in the U.S. that could completely change the EV battery game.