ANTARIKSA — Analysis of new data from NASA’s Mars rover robot, Curiosity, reveals that most of the craters on Mars were once rivers. Not only that, the area is a habitable zone.
“We found evidence that Mars was likely a river planet,” said Benjamin Cardenas, assistant professor of geosciences at Penn State and lead author of the new paper announcing the discovery. “We see signs of this all over the planet.”
In a study published in Geophysical Research Letters, researchers used numerical models to simulate erosion on Mars over thousands of years. The resulting, common crater formations, called bench and nose landforms, are likely the remains of ancient riverbeds.
The paper is the first study to map the erosion of ancient Martian soil by training a computer model. They used a combination of satellite data, Curiosity images and 3D stratigraphic scans. The last name is layers of rock called strata, which were deposited over millions of years beneath the surface of Mars. They also include Gulf of Mexico seafloor data.
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The analysis reveals a new interpretation of common crater formations on Mars that, until now, had never been associated with eroded river deposits. “We have to learn everything about Mars by better understanding how these river deposits can be interpreted stratigraphically, and considering today’s rocks as layers of sediment that were deposited over time,” Cardenas said.
According to him, this analysis is not a brief overview, but a record of changes. “What we see on Mars today are remnants of active geological history, not a landscape frozen in time.”
Previous studies of satellite data from Mars have identified erosional landforms called fluvial ridges. It was included as a candidate for ancient river deposits.
Using data collected by the Curiosity rover in Gale crater, the new research team discovered signs of river deposits unrelated to fluvial ridges. Instead, they discovered bench and nose landforms that had never before been associated with ancient river deposits.
“This suggests that there may be river deposits that have not been discovered elsewhere on the planet, and that a larger part of the Martian sedimentary record may have been formed by rivers during the habitable period of Mars’ history,” Cardenas said.
On Earth, he said, river corridors are very important for life, chemical cycles, nutrients and sediments. Everything suggests that Earth’s rivers behave similarly on Mars.
In designing their computer model, Cardenas and his team found new uses for 25-year-old stratigraphic scans of the Earth. Cardenas explained that scans collected by oil companies under the seabed of the Gulf of Mexico provide an ideal comparison with Mars.
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The team simulated Mars-like erosion using 3D scans of actual stratigraphy recorded on Earth. When they ran simulations, the model revealed a Martian erosional landscape that formed benches and topographic noses, not fluvial ridges. The landscape appears nearly identical to the landscape observed by the Curiosity rover inside Gale crater.
2023-10-25 10:01:00
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