The Perseverance rover landing site was not chosen at random. The morphology of the site, seen in satellite imagery, has attracted the attention of geologists, especially with the presence of two valleys that cut the edge of a Martian crater, suggesting that the fluvial system has an ancient lake at its heart. crater. Lake.
Perseverance ends right in the middle of the old lake
But nothing is certain. So over the past few months, the rover has studied several geological formations from a distance, mainly thanks to its instruments Great camera developed by a French-American team. This camera can indeed detect details of less than 10 centimeters at a distance of more than two kilometers. The first important observation phase is to determine the area of future research. And the images obtained thanks to Supercam are quite stunning: they observe layers of sediment, whose architecture is very similar to that of deltaic deposits on Earth.
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« The similarities between the sedimentary architecture of these Martian deltas and terrestrial deltas are striking. », underlined Nicolas Mangold, geologist at the Laboratory of planetology and geodynamics (University of Nantes), who led the study on the first data of Perseverance. This result, which appeared in the journal science, revealing that the total area of the Jezero crater (35 kilometers in diameter) was covered 3.6 billion years ago by a ten meter deep lake.
Old delta trail
The sedimentary deposits observed in the Jezero crater are indeed typical of what we see on earth at the mouth of a river or river.
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