Mars was once a 'vacation-style' beach planet, Chinese rover scans reveal

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China's Zhurong rover has found evidence of an ancient shoreline buried deep beneath the planet. That could point to an ocean, a beach, and to life.

Mars may once have been a prime holiday spot, with sandy beaches running along the shoreline of a large ocean, ground-penetrating radar by a Chinese rover has revealed.

The new findings, made by China's Zhurong rover during its journey across the Red Planet, are the latest evidence that Mars had a gigantic ocean called Deuteronilus more than 3 billion years ago.

And much like the primordial seas of its neighbor Earth, this ancient ocean could have harbored life, the researchers say. The team published their findings Feb. 25 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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We're finding places on Mars that used to look like ancient beaches and ancient river deltas," Benjamin Cardenas, assistant professor of geology at Penn State and co-author on the study, said in a statement. "We found evidence for wind, waves, no shortage of sand — a proper, vacation-style beach."

The Zhurong rover landed on Mars in 2021 in Utopia Planitia, one of the oldest and largest impact basins on the Red Planet. Since then the rover has been trundling along a desiccated shoreline, scanning the surrounding geology for signs of evaporated water and ice.

By scanning beneath the planet's surface with radar, Zhurong discovered layered structures filled with formations known as foreshore deposits. Like on Earth's beaches, these deposits are typically formed from sediments dropped by ocean tides and waves.

A hypothetical picture of Mars 3.6 billion years ago, with the ocean Deuteronilus covering half the planet. (Image credit: Robert Citron):