‘Curiosity’ reaches a Martian canal with evidence of river origin

Madrid. the rover Curiosity NASA has reached an area that may show evidence that liquid water flowed on Mars’ Mount Sharp for much longer than previously thought.

Billions of years ago, Mars was much wetter and probably warmer than today. Curiosity You’re getting a new look at that more Earth-like past as you make your way and eventually cross the Gediz Vallis Canal, a winding, snake-like feature that, at least from space, appears to have been carved by an ancient river.

That possibility has scientists intrigued. The rover team is looking for evidence confirming how the channel was carved into the underlying bedrock. The sides of the formation are steep enough that the team doesn’t believe the channel was created by wind. However, debris flows (fast, wet landslides) or a river carrying rocks and sediment could have had enough energy to excavate the bedrock. After the channel was formed, it was filled with rocks and other debris. Scientists are also eager to know whether this material was transported by debris flows or dry avalanches.

Since 2014, Curiosity has been ascending the foothills of Mount Sharp, which lies 5 kilometers above the floor of Gale Crater. The layers in this lower part of the mountain formed over millions of years amid a changing Martian climate, giving scientists a way to study how the presence of both water and the chemical ingredients necessary for Life changed over time.

For example, a lower part of those foothills included a layer rich in clay minerals where a large amount of water once interacted with the rock. Now the rover is exploring a deposit.

It will take months to fully explore the channel, and what scientists learn could revise the mountain’s formation timeline, according to NASA.

Once the sedimentary layers of the lower part of Mount Sharp were deposited by wind and water, erosion reduced them to expose the layers visible today. Only after these long processes, as well as intensely dry periods during which the surface of Mount Sharp was a sandy desert, could the Gediz Vallis canal be excavated.

Scientists believe that the rocks and other debris that later filled the channel came from high up the mountain, where the Curiosity will never go, which gave the team an idea of ​​what kind of material may be up there.

“If the channel or the debris pile was formed with liquid water, that’s really interesting. It would mean that quite late in the history of Mount Sharp, after a long dry period, the water returned, and to a large extent,” he said. Curiosity. Ashwin Vasavada, project scientist, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

That explanation would be consistent with one of the most surprising discoveries that Curiosity has done while driving towards Mount Sharp: the water appears to have come and gone in phases, rather than gradually disappearing as the planet became drier. These cycles can be seen in evidence of mud cracks; shallow salt lakes; and, directly below the channel, cataclysmic debris flows that accumulated to create the extensive Gediz Vallis ridge.

Last year, Curiosity made a challenging ascent to study the ridge, which covers the slopes of Mount Sharp and appears to grow from the end of the channel, suggesting that the two are part of a geological system.

Curiosity documented the channel with a 360-degree black-and-white panorama from the rover’s left navigation camera. Taken on February 3rd. (the 4,086th Martian day, or sol, of the mission), the image shows dark sand filling one side of the channel and a pile of debris rising just behind the sand. In the opposite direction is the steep slope that he climbed Curiosity to get to this area.

The rover takes these types of panoramas with its navigation cameras at the end of each trip. Now the science team is relying even more on the navigation cameras as engineers try to solve a problem that limits the use of a camera belonging to the color Mast Camera, or Mastcam.