Perseverance rover confirms existence of ancient Mars lake and river delta
By Mike Wall about 6 hours ago
The new results will help mission team members plan out the rover's next moves.
Inferred paleolake level inside Mars’ Jezero Crater at the time of Kodiak sediment deposition. The red star indicates theOctavia E. Butler (OEB) landing site of NASA’s Perseverance rover. Background from the Context Camera (CTX) mosaic. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/LPG)
NASA chose the landing site of its life-hunting Perseverance Mars rover wisely.
Perseverance touched down in February on the floor of the 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) Jezero Crater, which was picked primarily because previous observations by Mars orbiters suggested that it hosted a big lake and a river delta in the ancient past.
Photos snapped by Perseverance early in its mission, before the car-sized robot even started roving, confirm this interpretation, a new study reports.
More:
https://www.space.com/mars-rover-perseverance-confirms-lake-delta-jezero-crater?utm_source=notification
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SPACE 7 October 2021
By Jason Arunn Murugesu
Rock layers in Kodiak butte on Mars in an image taken by the Perseverance rover
NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL/CNES/CNRS/IRAP/LPG
The ancient lake that once sat in Jezero crater on Mars flooded billions of years ago, transporting large boulders through a river delta and depositing fine-grained clay that could potentially preserve signs of ancient life.
Nicolas Mangold at the University of Nantes in France and his colleagues analysed photographs of a cliff face taken by NASA’s Perseverance rover from February to May 2021. The researchers identified three parts of a rock formation shown in the images called Kodiak butte, at the opening of the lake.
At the top, there are large boulders, the biggest of which is 1.5 metres wide and 1 metre high, that suggest the flow of water into the lake sped up enough at one point that it could carry the rocks over tens of kilometres. Below the boulders, they found a build-up of sediment that points to a steady and consistent river flow before the boulder-carrying floods hit the crater. We have no idea what caused the floods, Mangold says.
Meanwhile, on the lowest layer the team saw evidence of mudstones, which Mangold says are most capable of storing signs of ancient life. “These images are a rock-solid case for the presence of a sustained lake at Jezero crater,” says Joe Levy at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. “The features I’m most excited about… are these muddier, finer-grained parts of the delta [which] have never been explored on Mars and have the best chance of preserving organic matter or other clues to whether any organisms could have called the lake home during Mars’ early, warmer, wetter period.”
More:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2293108-ancient-mars-lake-had-fast-moving-floods-that-carried-huge-boulders/