NASA's rover Curiosity will investigate signs of climate change on Mars, and the results can be useful for testing climate models for Earth, reports the Guardian. "You learn about how to understand an atmosphere by seeing different atmospheres, and the more we know about Mars' atmosphere, the better we can really understand our own," Mark Lemmon, a planetary scientist from Texas A&M University who is part of Curiosity's climate team told the Guardian.
"Realistically, we cannot sit here on Earth and deliberately mess our climate in order to test the models," Lemmon said. "And that's what I think the real power of the climate part of the Mars program is all about." The NASA team hopes that the programme could shed light on how carbon cycles are now contributing to climate change on Earth, even if Mars' atmosphere is completely different from Earth's.