As of: January 31, 2024, 10:02 a.m
By: Tanja Banner
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The NASA rover “Perseverance” shows that there was once water on Mars.
Now researchers hope that the rover will also find evidence of past life.
Los Angeles - When it came to choosing the landing site for the Mars rover "Perseverance", the US space agency Nasa chose the Jezero crater.
The background was the suspicion that it could be a former lake.
Since landing in February 2021, the rover has found several fairly clear indications that water may actually have once flowed at its landing site.
Now the rover has discovered clear evidence of ancient water in Jezero Crater on Mars from a different perspective.
To do this, “Perseverance” used its RIMFAX ground-penetrating radar device to look deep beneath the surface of the Jezero crater.
The rover sent radar waves into the ground every ten centimeters, which penetrated to a depth of 20 meters.
With the data that the rover was able to collect on Mars, researchers can take a close look at how the soil in the crater is composed.
“Some geologists say that radar's ability to see beneath the surface is a kind of fraud,” smiles David Paige, deputy leader of the RIMFAX investigation.
NASA's Perseverance rover looks beneath the surface of Mars
"From orbit we can see a bunch of different deposits, but we can't say with certainty whether what we see is their original state or whether we are seeing the conclusion of a long geological history," Paige emphasized in a statement.
“To know how these things formed, we have to look beneath the surface.”
Artist's impression: This is what the Jezero crater, where the NASA rover “Perseverance” landed on Mars, might once have looked like: Well filled with water.
© NASA/JPL
That's exactly what "Perseverance" did on behalf of the research team on Earth - and sent exciting data to Earth: The images show clear evidence of two different periods of sediment deposition, which lie between two periods of erosion.
The sediments are regular and horizontal - just like the sediments that are deposited in lakes on Earth.
This means that “Perseverance” can confirm the existence of lake sediments in the Jezero crater on Mars for the first time.
“Large-scale changes in the environment of Mars”
“The changes we see in the rock record are due to large-scale changes in the Martian environment,” emphasizes Paige.
The researcher is pleased: “It's great that we can see so much evidence of change in such a small geographical area, which allows us to extend our findings to the entire crater.”
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The study by Paige's research team was
published in the journal
Science Advances .
Overall, the work shows that the Martian crater was once filled with water, which deposited layers of sediment on the crater floor.
Over time the lake shrank.
The river that fed the lake carried away sediment - a huge river delta was formed.
Over time, the water in the lake and river disappeared, the sediments eroded, and the geological features that can still be seen on Mars today emerged.
NASA rover is supposed to search for former life on Mars
Researchers now hope that “Perseverance” is not only looking for water in the right place, but that possible traces of life may also have survived in the Jezero crater.
Finally, it is possible that microbial life lived in the Martian crater when it was moist.
It is hoped that such traces could be detectable in sediment samples from the crater.
“Perseverance” is on Mars, among other things, looking for evidence of early microbiological life.
To do this, the rover takes rock samples that are then stored on Mars for a later mission.
In the future, the samples will be returned to Earth, where they will be examined by researchers.
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