NASA discovered a gem mine on Mars, are aliens 'guarding' it?

The lucky Mars rover Curiosity has captured a strange image of a glowing fissure that houses a gem deposit that could be evidence of life.

In a photo released by NASA, something that looks like a "halo" appears across the barren surface of Mars.

NASA's long-suffering and lucky rover, Curiosity, got close and discovered that the fissure was the entrance to an ancient lake bed filled with opals. In addition to being a literal treasure trove, the semi-precious stones yielded something even more valuable: Evidence of a possible alien presence , very recently!

NASA's "golden" photo reveals signs of a fault point where the entrance to the world could very well be - (Photo: NASA).

According to Live Science, geologists explain that these opals show that water and rock interacted below the surface of Mars much more recently than previously thought, improving the prospect that life was once there, or even still lurks somewhere.

Water is the missing piece to Mars's quest to become a habitable planet, after scientists showed that in subsurface shelters life could survive protected from the planet's powerful radiation.

There is plenty of evidence of water on Mars. Curiosity and other NASA robots have also been wandering through areas that were clearly ancient river deltas. But they dried up billions of years ago, leading some to think that Martian life—if there were any—has been extinct for billions of years.

But opals from an area called Gale Crater , a 154-kilometer-wide ancient lake bed that Curiosity has been exploring since 2012, have shed new light.

A team of scientists led by physicist Travis Gabriel from the US Geological Survey looked at Curiosity's vast trove of data and found the surprise. The analysis of the rock's chemical properties was done indirectly through analysis of a set of other fracture zones, including the Lubango drill site .

At Lubango, scientists piloted DAN, a device that measures neutrons bounced off the Martian surface mounted on Curiosity, which helped it detect water because neutrons are slowed down in the presence of hydrogen, the main component of water.

The results identified opal, a water-rich rock. 'Given the pervasive fault network at Gale Crater, it is reasonable to expect that these habitable subsurface conditions extend to many other areas of the lake bed, and possibly other parts of Mars. These environments formed long ago when the ancient lakes at Gale Crater dried up,' said Dr Gabriel.

The study was recently published in the scientific journal Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.