The ardent explorer, who spent months traveling to Mars, couldn’t have landed in a more interesting place.
Kawah Lake – A dry, windswept patch of Martian rock, where the rover landed in February It used to be the bottom of a lake fed by an ancient river with floods so strong they could move rocks, scientists say.
those results, It was published last week in Science, confirming scientists’ suspicions that the craters contained lakes millions of years ago, and also suggesting that this part of Mars had a warm and humid past with more complex water cycles than is known.
“There’s a river running down here,” said Katie Stack Morgan, deputy project scientist for the Mars 2020 Project and author of a research paper, of the Jezero landscape about 3.5 million years ago. “Perhaps Jezero is a good place to have a life and that environment has evolved over time.”
Further studies could help researchers understand why the planet is drying up and provide new clues about whether the planet once supported life.
View from the ground
New perspectives – thanks to persistence – and the work of scientists’ geological investigations made this idea possible.
The rover, which sends images of the crater’s surface to Earth, is giving scientists a new view that cannot be seen from space.
“What you think you see from orbit around Mars may not be what you see when you enter the crater at eye level,” said Stack Morgan.
Surface-level images support scientists’ theory that Jezero once contained a deep lake.
The images also give scientists, including 39 scientific paper authors, the ability to analyze rock layers in an outcrop called Kodiak. The researchers found that this layer corresponds to how river deltas arose on Earth, indicating the flow of water into ancient lakes.
But the visuals also contain some surprises. On another cliff near Kodiak, scientists saw boulders — some up to five feet wide and formed by water — within the top layer of the formation, according to the scientific paper.
They suspect that the rock was deposited during a major flood event that was strong enough to rapidly change watersheds on Mars.
They don’t know what caused these floods, but they speculated in the papers that heavy rains, rapid snowmelt or changes in glacial ice could trigger the floods.
“It’s really hard to rebuild this kind of thing,” said Stack Morgan.
Look for signs of life
Perseverance was the first rover to collect and store samples of Martian rock.
Stack Morgan said it was exciting to know for sure that the rover would visit and collect samples from the ancient lake the river flows through.
This means explorers will have access to a wide variety of rock types deposited in the crater. The rover should also be able to reach out and sample ancient lake bottoms, he said, which is “exactly the type of bed on Earth that’s great for organic matter and biosignatures.”
Rover may be in the right place to answer some of humanity’s deepest questions.
“That’s why we came to Jezero with such perseverance,” he said. “So far, Jezero has not disappointed.”
–
