2023-05-12 13:00:00
Scientists believe that these bands of rocks may have been formed by a very fast and deep river – the first such evidence to have been found on Mars. NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover captured this scene at a location dubbed “Skrinkle Haven” using its Mastcam-Z camera between February 28 and March 9, 2023.
Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS
Since it was launched in 2020, the rover Perseverance NASA has been exploring Mars, seeking to characterize the Red Planet’s geology and climate in the past. The ship has focused on collecting samples of the planet’s soil, but now a new photo it took shows what could be the place where a ‘wild’ river passed, as characterized by the US space agency.
Now, Perseverance is exploring the top of a pile of sedimentary rock in the form of a fan 250 meters high and with curved layers. These suggest that there was once water flowing through it. Due to the characteristics of the place, one of the questions that scientists are asking is whether there was a relatively shallow stream there or a more powerful river.
NASA’s Curiosity rover, which explored the Red Planet before Perseverance, found signs of shallow rivers in Gale Crater. (You can also read: They detect the largest cosmic explosion recorded so far)
So the scientists operating the Perseverance rover stitched together hundreds of images captured by the rover’s Mastcam-Z instrument to form two new mosaics that suggest that Perseverance is indeed exploring the site of a raging river.
Two important clues allow researchers to think this through: coarse sediment grains and boulders. “This indicates that it is a high-energy river that carries a lot of debris. The more powerful the water flow, the more easily it can move larger pieces of material,” he explained through a announcement Libby Ives, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in southern California, which operates the Perseverance rover.
Ives has spent the last six months analyzing images of the surface of Mars. “It has been a joy to look at rocks from another planet and see processes that are so familiar to us,” she said. Although scientists had already noted a series of curved bands of layered rock within the Jezero crater, the one that Perseverance explores, can so far take a close look at them from the photos the rover took. (It may interest you: Saturn dethrones Jupiter and is now the planet with the most moons in the solar system)
Now, the researchers are trying to determine if the type of river was there, although they are almost completely sure that it was a powerful one. They want to know if it was something more like the Mississippi, winding through the landscape, or a braided river.
So they continue to examine Mastcam-Z images and are investigating below the surface with the ground-penetrating radar instrument RIMFAX (Radar Imager for Mars’ Subsurface Experiment).
“What is exciting is that we have entered a new phase in the history of Jezero. And it’s the first time we’ve seen environments like this on Mars,” Perseverance deputy project scientist Katie Stack Morgan of JPL said in the statement. “We are thinking about rivers on a different scale than we have before.”
In general, Perseverance is responsible for characterizing the geology and the planet’s climate in the past, “will pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet and will be the first mission to collect and store Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust),” NASA said. The material you collect will be analyzed by a state-of-the-art laboratory on Earth.
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