nasa-rover-confirms-ancient-lake-sediments-on-red-planet

The Perseverance rover has made a historic revelation while exploring the Jezero Crater on Mars, confirming long-standing speculations that the region was once teeming with water approximately three billion years ago.

 

The car-sized rover captured detailed images of the crater, providing scientists with a cross-sectional view of rock layers approximately 65 feet deep. This perspective, likened to observing a road cut, revealed sediments that were unmistakably deposited by water, shedding light on Mars' ancient watery past.

 

The significance of this finding cannot be overstated, as it reinforces previous studies' suggestions that Mars, once cold, arid, and seemingly lifeless, harbored warm, wet conditions conducive to life.

 

The selection of Jezero Crater for the rover's mission was strategic, driven by earlier discoveries of water-rich minerals in the basin.

 

Data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which orbits the Red Planet, had hinted at the presence of clays within the crater, a telltale sign of past water activity. However, it is the recent evidence gathered by Perseverance that unequivocally confirms the existence of flowing water within the basin.

 

The study was led by teams from the University of California (UC) at Los Angeles and the University of Oslo in Norway, who published it in the journal Science Advances.

 

They observed that the crater floor beneath the delta formation exhibited irregularities, indicating erosion caused by water before the deposition of lake sediments.

 

Soundings from the rover's RIMFAX radar instrument allowed scientists to peer underground to get a cross-sectional view of rock layers 20 metres deep,"almost like looking a road cut", said ULCA planetary scientist David Paige, the first author of this paper.

 

"The radar images show that the sediments are regular and horizontal, just like sediments deposited in lakes on Earth. The existence of lake sediments had been suspected in previous studies, but has been confirmed by this research," shared the team in their announcement.