Water on Mars? The incredible photo taken by a NASA rover

For nearly three years, NASA’s Perseverance rover has been scouring Mars to find out if life ever existed on the planet. Mission which seems complex since March is a thousand times drier than the Atacama Desert, one of the environments on Earth that comes closest to the parched surface of the Red Planet.

He had already found signs of soggy sand and rushing rivers, bone-shaped rocks, strange objects, and the like. Now he found out evidence of a “moving and energetic” river, signaling that Mars may have had more water than previously thought.

NASA’s rover has been exploring Mars’ Jezero crater since landing in February 2021. The 45-kilometer-wide crater once housed a large lake and a river delta and the rover scours it for signs of ancient life due to the presence of a diverse range of minerals.

Now the space agency’s rover has detected evidence that much more water could have existed. perseverance took images of a vast field of rocks in the middle of the waterway, evaporated billions of years ago, leaving traces of the pebble-rich debris it once carried.

According NASA explains: “These boulders were transported by water deeper or faster than the old channel that deposited the small pebbles that also populate the area.” Scientists believe that because the rocks are on top of the pebbles, they may have arrived much later.

The image captured by the NASA rover shows the rocks adorning the upper part of the Jezero Crater fan deposit. The tracks of the Perseverance, which is the size of a car, give an idea of ​​the scale of the rocks. As a reference, each wheel of the rover is half a meter wide, so the rocks are of considerable size.

There NASA explains that the science team is excited about the mission because the rover drilled into a rock in the Emerald Lake conglomerate that it contains a lot of geological information about places on Mars that Perseverance will never be able to visit.

the core of the sample number 20, called Pico Otis, It shows clearly colored areas that are individual minerals transported from elsewhere via a river that once flowed into Jezero Crater in the past.

Ken Farley, Perseverance project scientist at Caltech in Pasadena, told NASA: “And while the water that created the Martian riverbed that Perseverance is currently exploring evaporated billions of years ago, the history that these waters transmit remains fresh, stored in the rock of the conglomerate.

The photograph was taken by Perseverance’s Mastcam-Z camera system on July 6, 2023 on the 845th day of its mission to Mars. Everything to search for signs of ancient microbial life on the planet. Their objective is to characterize its geology, its past climate and to pave the way for human exploration on Mars.

In the future, subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with the European Space Agency (ESA), will send a spacecraft to collect samples from the surface of Mars and send them back to Earth to study the details such as its age, what the environmental conditions were in the river when the conglomerate formed, and whether it contains signs of ancient microbial life. But still missing for that.

For now, Perseverance explores the top of a 40-meter high fan-shaped stack of sedimentary rock, then heads to a low ridge called Snowdrift Peak.

The Mars Perseverance rover wrote on its Twitter on July 19: “From large boulders to tiny pebbles, the ancient riverbed I’m exploring right now has it all. These fragments, washed upstream, can help my team uncover the river’s past and its potential to support ancient life.”