[Music] sent to look for conditions where life could have begun is NASA's Mars reconnaissance Orbiter mro sends back more data than all other Mars missions combined [Music] mro has three cameras on board the first is the Marcy weather camera it sees Horizon to Horizon on every orbit so it builds up a map of the entire planet every day so you can see a global weather map every day on Mars the second camera is the context camera it provides high resolution and it's covered about 99 of the surface [Music] mro has made more than 60 thousand orbits [Music] its high resolution cameras revealing Mars in unprecedented detail discovering polar avalanches [Music] shifting sand dunes and what looked like seasonal flows of sand or even liquid melt water then in 2017 mro turns its gaze to one of the red planet's oldest features the eredalia basin thought to have been an ancient sea aredania Basin is a huge Basin in some of the most ancient crust on Mars it Formed about 3.8 billion years ago and it held more water than 10 times that of the great lakes or three times that of the Caspian Sea on Earth [Music] and it is on the ancient seabed that mro sees something remarkable emeros saw a massive 400 meter thick deposit formed from a mineral that forms in deep sea hydrothermal environments such as one that might have undersea vents Mars not only had the same ingredients for life as Earth it also had an active environment to spark it into action foreign Basin was an ancient sea 3.7 to 3.8 billion years ago and that's about the same time when life was first emerging on Earth this might have been a place where life could have existed because those hydrothermal vents underneath that sea might have created a very conducive environment for life these initial conditions in the history of both planets look so similar that it seems reasonable to expect that this could eventually lead to life [Music] these actively fertile conditions are thought to survive in places like the aredania Basin for hundreds of millions of years [Music] but then 3.7 billion years ago something happens that transforms prospects for Life on Mars forever Mars underwent a fairly substantial transformation in its climate time it got colder what liquid water there was either soaked into the ground and froze or froze at the surface a lot of It ultimately would get transported to the poles where it forms these big thick ice caps that we see today at the same time as the temperature plummets ours becomes more volcanically active leading to catastrophic flooding water rages down from the Southern Highlands till the place known as echoscasma it plunges over Cliffs four kilometers high [Music] creating the largest waterfall of the solar system has ever seen foreign [Music] cascading into a spectacular Canyon 10 kilometers wide by a hundred kilometers long [Music] once the floods subside the water disappears the only trace it ever existed etched into the planet's surface