Mutiul Alim | Thursday, 16/12/2021 17:10 WIB
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NASA’s Mars rover (Photo: BBC)
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New York, Jurnas.com – Robot explorer NASA who is on a mission to Planet Mars, Perseverance, managed to identify the oldest rocks at the landing site.
The rock is of volcanic origin, possibly the product of ancient lava flows. After these rocks are brought back to Earth, hopefully NASA can determine when the rock was formed.
Quoted from BBC on Thursday (16/12), this identification is not only useful for increasing historical understanding of the landing site, but also Mars in general and the wider Solar System beyond.
Purdue University science team member Briony Horgan said the identification represented a “very big problem”.
As is well known, aircraft NASA down to Jezero Crater, Mars in February. This location was chosen because the crater in the satellite image contains a delta, which is a structure consisting of mud and sand like a lake.
This is the kind of geological feature that might record traces of past microbial life on Mars all the way back billions of years.
The rover didn’t land on the delta itself but on the crater floor. This is where the robot finds its bedrock.
Previously, the Mars mission team was surprised when Perseverance began drilling into a field called Séítah, and examined its geochemistry in detail.
The instrument detected many ingested olivine crystals surrounded by pyroxene minerals. Geologists describe what Perseverance sees as texture piling up, according to Kelsey Moore of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
“And the reason why it’s important is, the texture of the accumulation strongly indicates a certain type of igneous rock that formed as a very thick body of magma cooled, and olivine crystals crystallized and sank and then pyroxene formed around those olivine crystals,” he explained.
TAGS : Planet Mars NASA Explorer Robot Oldest Rock
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