NASA’s Mars Mission: The Perseverance rover has recently found evidence of ancient lake sediments at Jezero Crater’s floor, offering new hope for finding traces of past life on the Red Planet.
NASA’s Mars Mission: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)’s Perseverance rover has recently found evidence of ancient lake sediments at the base of Mars’ Jezero Crater. This new discovery has offered new hope for finding traces of life in samples on the Red Planet. The rover has been scouring the crater to find sings of past life on the planet and also collecting samples for a possible future return to Earth. As per the statement, researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the University of Oslo revealed fresh insights into the formation of sediment layers over time on the crater floor. The scientists and researchers studied the data collected using the rover’s Radar Imager for Mars’ Subsurface Experiment (RIMFAX) instrument.
“From orbit we can see a bunch of different deposits, but we can’t tell for sure if what we’re seeing is their original state, or if we’re seeing the conclusion of a long geological story. To tell how these things formed, we need to see below the surface,” Space.Com quoted David Paige’s statement, who is the first author of the study, RIMFAX’s deputy principal investigator and UCLA professor.
NASA’s Mission Mars: Perseverance Rover
The rover landed on the Red Planet in February 2021 inside the 45 kilometers Jezero Crater, which is believed to have once hosted a large lake and river delta. Since then, rover has been scouring the crater in search of signs of past life and collecting samples.
NASA’s Mission Mars: How RIMFAX Instrument Works
When the rover travels on the Mar’s surface, the RIMFAX instrument sends radar waves downward at intervals of 10-centimetre and measures pulses reflected from depths of about 20 meters below the surface. This is done to create a subsurface profile of the crater floor.
NASA’s Mission Mars: The Possibility
The recent RIMFAX data showed evidence of sediment deposited by water that once filled Jezero Crater. These findings have ignited the possibility that microbial life could have lived in the Jezero. If microbial life existed on Red Planet, sediment samples from the crater would contain signs of their remains.
Two separate deposition periods occurred, which created layers of sediments on the Jezero crater’s floor that appear regular and horizontal. The statement mentions that variations in the water levels of the lake caused some of the sediment deposits which led to the creation of a massive delta,
which the rover explored between May and December 2022.
The radar measurements also find an uneven crater floor below the delta, which, according to the scientists, is expected because of erosion before sediments were first deposited. As the lake dried, the sediment layers were eroded, forming the geologic features visible on the surface today.
“The changes we see preserved in the rock record are driven by large-scale changes in the Martian environment.” It’s cool that we can see so much evidence of change in such a small geographic area, which allows us [to] extend our findings to the scale of the entire crater,” Space.com quoted Paige’s statement.
Note: The findings were published on January 26 in the journal Science Advances.
