“China’s Zhurong Rover Discovers Potentially Water-Bearing Area on Mars”

CNN Indonesia

Tuesday, 02 May 2023 06:59 WIB

Jakarta, CNN Indonesia —

Owned rover ChinaZhurong discovered the area on the Planet Mars potentially contain water. The area is found on a sandy hill.

According to reports South China Morning PostThe news comes after mission chiefs admitted Zhurong had not yet returned to operations after going into hibernation mode for the Martian winter nearly a year ago.

It is possible that the solar panels on the rover are covered in dust, stopping the power source. As a result, the rover cannot operate again.

But before falling into suspended animation again, Zhurong managed to find a sandy hill rich in salt with lots of crevices and crust. According to experts, the hill may have mixed with morning frost or snow that melted several hundred thousand years ago.

They estimate the date range of the crust and other features on the hill formed in Utopia Planitia, namely 1.4 million to 400 thousand years ago. Utopia Planitia itself is a vast region in the northern hemisphere of Mars.

Conditions during this period were similar to those existing today on Mars, with rivers and lakes drying up and no longer flowing as they did billions of years ago.

Study of the structure and chemical makeup of the hills can provide insight into the “possible water activity” of this period.

“We thought it could be a small amount, no more than a layer of water on the surface,” said one of the study authors, Qin Xiaoguang of the Institute of Geology and Geophysics.

Rover Zhurong actually does not directly detect water in the form of frozen or dew. But Qin said it was obtained from computer simulations and observations by other probes on Mars, which indicated that even at certain times of the year, conditions exist that would allow water to appear.

Experts have published the results of their studies in Science Advances. According to them, tiny pockets of water from melting ice or snow, mixed with salt, likely have produced small cracks, hard crusty surfaces, loose particles and other mound features such as basins and ridges.

They ruled out wind as a cause, as well as frost made of carbon dioxide, which makes up most of the Martian atmosphere.

The presence of ice on Mars has been observed since NASA’s Viking missions in the 1970s. But the ice is expected to occur in certain locations under certain conditions as well

The Zhurong rover itself is thought to have provided “evidence that there may be a much wider distribution of these processes on Mars than previously identified,” said Mars geologist Mary Bourke of Trinity College Dublin.

However small this watery niche may be, it is important to identify a livable environment, he added.

(lth)