Fri 08 October 2021:
According to a research released Thursday, images from Mars illustrate how water helped form the Red Planet’s landscape billions of years ago, and provide clues that will lead the search for ancient life.
The Perseverance rover from NASA landed at Jezero crater in February, where scientists believe a long-gone river once fed a lake, depositing sediment in a fan-shaped delta visible from space.
From space, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and other spacecraft gave us tantalizing hints about Jezero Crater’s watery past. Now that the @NASAPersevere rover is providing close-ups from the ground, scientists have encountered some geological surprises: https://t.co/9tXmiFNsDS pic.twitter.com/ern4PqRkV6
— NASA Mars (@NASAMars) October 7, 2021
The study published in Science analyzed at high-resolution photographs of the cliffs that were originally the delta’s banks taken by Perseverance.
The formation of the cliffs is revealed through layers within the cliffs.
NASA astrobiologist Amy Williams and her team in Florida found similarities between features of the cliffs seen from the crater floor and patterns in Earth’s river deltas.
According to the study, the form of the bottom three layers revealed the existence of water and a constant flow of water early on, showing Mars was “warm and humid enough to support a hydrologic cycle” approximately 3.7 billion years ago.
The top and most recent layers feature boulders measuring more than a metre in diameter scattered about, probably carried there by violent flooding.
However, it is the fine-grained silt of the base layer that will most likely be sampled for traces of long-extinct life on Mars, if it ever existed.
The findings will aid researchers in determining where to send the rover in quest of valuable “biosignatures” of probable Martian life forms in soil and rocks.
“From orbital images, we knew it had to be water that formed the delta,” Williams said in a press release.
“But having these images is like reading a book instead of just looking at the cover.”
Finding out whether life may have existed on Mars is the main mission of Perseverence, a project that took decades and cost billions of dollars to develop.
The multi-tasking rover will collect 30 rock and soil samples in sealed tubes over the course of several years, with the samples being returned to Earth in the 2030s for lab study.
Perseverance obtained two rock samples in Jezero that showed signs of being in contact with groundwater for a long time, according to mission scientists.
They believe the materials may have once hosted ancient microbial life, whose evidence could have been trapped by salt minerals.
Perseverance landed on February 18, and the study looks at long-distance images it captured during its first three months on Mars.
About the size of an SUV, it is equipped with 19 cameras, a two metre (seven foot) long robotic arm, two microphones, and a suite of cutting-edge instruments.
Perseverance traveled from Earth to Mars in seven months with its sister craft Ingenuity, a miniature helicopter whose rotors must spin five times faster than Earth counterparts to acquire lift in the significantly less dense atmosphere.
(with Agency)
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