NASA is increasingly certain there was life on Mars here

For three years, NASA’s Perseverance rover has been traveling to Mars to discover if life ever existed on the planet. Previously, he had found signs of soggy sand and rushing rivers, bone-shaped rocks, strange objects and much more. However, Their latest discovery is something really cool: Jezero Crater on Mars was once filled with water.

NASA’s rover has been exploring Mars’ Jezero Crater since landing on the Moon in February 2021. Previously, scientists already had clues that Mars was once covered in water and may have supported microbial life. However, The rover eventually verified that there was a lake in the crater, raising hopes of finding traces of past life.

In new research published in the journal Scientists progress, A team led by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the University of Oslo discovered that at one time the Jezero crater, formed by the impact of an ancient meteorite just north of the The Martian equator filled with water, depositing layers of sediment at the bottom of the crater, reports the release .

According to scientists, the lake shrank and the sediment carried by the river that fed it formed an enormous delta . As the lake dissipated over time, The crater’s sediments eroded, forming the geological features visible today on the surface.

“From orbit we can see lots of different deposits, but we can’t say for sure whether what we see is their original state or whether we see the conclusion of a long geological history,” David said Paige, teacher. of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences at UCLA and first author of the paper. “To know how these things formed, we have to look beneath the surface.”

And that’s exactly what Perseverance did. The car-sized rover has been collecting samples from the 45-kilometer-wide Jezero crater since 2021. In 2022, it will head toward a vast expanse of 3 billion-year-old sediments that from orbit , can be seen. river deltas of the Earth.

There, the instrument Perseverance Radar Imager for Mars Subsurface Experiment (RIMFAX), launched radar waves downward at 10-centimeter intervals and measured the reflected pulses at depths of about 20 meters below the surface. Using radar, scientists were able to see down to the base of the sediments to reveal the upper surface of the buried crater floor.

RIMFAX images revealed two distinct periods of sediment deposition sandwiched between two periods of erosion. One of them reports that the crater floor beneath the delta is not uniformly flat, suggesting that a period of erosion occurred before the lake sediments were deposited, the release notes.

These layers provide unequivocal evidence that water-borne soil sediments were deposited in Jezero Crater. and its delta from a river that fed it, as is the case in the Earth’s lakes.

A second period of deposition occurred when fluctuations in lake level allowed the river to deposit a large delta that once extended into the lake’s interior, but which has now eroded closer to the river mouth.

These results reinforced what previous studies had long suggested: that Mars, cold and arid, was once warm, humid and possibly habitable. “It’s great that we can see so much evidence of change in such a small geographic area, allowing us to expand our findings to the scale of the entire crater,” Paige said.

The rover collected rocks and dust from the Martian surface, which show signs of organic compounds. But according to scientists, It is impossible to say whether these compounds come from biological or geological sources until a separate mission is sent to collect the inventory and experts then analyze it in detail.

“This sequence of events… reinforces the idea that Jezero Crater recorded a rich geological history driven by large-scale changes in the Martian environment,” they write authors. “A more complete understanding of these events may have to await the return and analysis of Perseverance samples.”

Perseverance’s soil and rock samples will be returned to Earth during a future expedition planned by the European Space Agency (ESA), and will be studied for evidence of past lives. Your inventory is 60% full.