Water on Mars of these salts". NASA also reported that Jake M rock, a rock encountered by "Curiosity" on the way to Glenelg, was a mugearite and very similar to terrestrial mugearite rocks. On December 9, 2013, NASA reported that Mars once had a large freshwater lake inside Gale Crater, that could have been a hospitable environment for microbial life. On December 16, 2014, NASA reported detecting an unusual increase, then decrease, in the amounts of methane in the atmosphere of the planet Mars; in addition, organic chemicals were detected in powder drilled from a rock by the "Curiosity" rover. Also, based on
Mars sample-return mission basis for a Mars sample-return mission. In September 2012, NASA announced its intention to further study several strategies of bringing a sample of Mars to Earth – including a multiple launch scenario, a single-launch scenario and a multiple-rover scenario – for a mission beginning as early as 2018. Dozens of samples would be collected and cached by the Mars 2020 rover, and would be left on the surface of Mars for possible later retrieval. A "fetch rover" would retrieve the sample caches and deliver them to a Mars ascent vehicle (MAV). In July 2018 NASA contracted Airbus to produce a