REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, JAKARTA — Sedimentary evidence ancient lake at the bottom of Jezero Crater Mars offers new hope of finding traces of life in samples collected by rover Perseverance NASA. Reported SpaceSunday (28/1/2024), Perseverance landed on February 18, 2021 in Jezero Crater 45 kilometers wide on Mars. Jezero Crater is believed to have once housed a large lake and river delta.
The rover has scoured the crater for signs of past life and collected and stored dozens of samples along the way for possible return to Earth in the future.
Using the rover’s Radar Image for Mars’s Subsurface Experiment (RIMFAX) instrument, researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the University of Oslo, revealed new clues about how layers of sediment formed over time at the bottom of the crater, according to a statement.
“From orbit we can see a collection of different deposits, but we can’t be sure whether what we’re seeing is the original state, or whether we’re seeing the conclusion of a long geological story,” David Paige, first author of the study, RIMFAX co-principal investigator and UCLA professor , said in his statement.
“To find out how these things form, we need to look below the surface.”
As Perseverance moves across the Martian surface, the RIMFAX instrument sends radar waves downward at 10-centimeter intervals and measures the reflected waves from a depth of about 20 meters below the surface to create a subsurface profile of the crater floor.
RIMFAX data shows evidence of sediment deposited by water that once filled the crater. It is possible that microbial life could have lived in the crater at this time and, if such life existed on Mars, sediment samples from the area would contain signs of such microbial remains.
Two distinct periods of deposition occurred, creating layers of sediment at the bottom of the crater that appear regular and horizontal, similar to the layers of strata seen on Earth. According to the statement, fluctuations in the lake’s water level caused some sediment deposits to form a very large delta, which Perseverance traversed between May and December 2022.
Radar measurements also show an uneven crater floor beneath the delta, likely caused by erosion before the sediments were first deposited. As the lake dried out over time, layers of sediment in the crater eroded away, forming the geological features visible on the surface of Mars today.
“The changes we see in the rock record are driven by large-scale changes in the Martian environment,” Paige said in a statement. “It is exciting to see so much evidence of change in such a small geographic area, allowing us to expand our findings to the scale of the entire crater.”
2024-01-28 05:01:45
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