NASA says the minerals and rock deposits at Salda are among the most suitable on earth to those around the Jezero Crater where the spacecraft landed and are believed to have been flooded with water.
The information gathered from Lake Salda could help scientists as they look for fossil traces of microbial life preserved in the sediments thought to have settled around the long-lost deltas and lakes it once fed.
“Salda … will be a strong analogy where we can study and interrogate,” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science, told Reuters.
A team of American and Turkish planetary scientists conducted research in 2019 on the shoreline of a lake, known as the Turkish Maldives for its blue waters and white beaches. Scientists believe that the sediment around the lake was eroded from the large mounds that were formed with the help of microbes known as microbes.
The team behind the Perseverance explorer, the most advanced astrobiology lab ever flown to another world, wanted to find out if there were any microbes in Jezero Crater.
The team behind the Perseverance explorer will also compare coastal sediments from the Salda with carbonate minerals – formed from carbon dioxide and water, the main ingredients of life – detected on the outskirts of the Jezero Crater.
“When we find something in Persistence, we can go back to Lake Salda to really see the two processes, (see) the similarities but equally important differences between Persistence and Lake Salda,” the association administrator for NASA science told Reuters. .
Rock samples drilled from the soil of Mars must be deposited on the surface to be retrieved and sent to Earth by two future robotic missions, as early as 2031. The official NASA Earth Twitter account mentions lake Salda in their tweet a day before NASA rover Perseverance landed on Mars .
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