They find an ancient crater lake

Three meters long, 23 cameras, weighing just over a ton and a two-meter robotic arm. This is the Perseverance rover, which has been analyzing the surface of Mars for almost three years. The goal was to use seven tools to analyze the chemical and molecular composition of rocks and identify possible organic compounds. And if life ever existed on Mars, then the lake is deposited at the foot of Jezero Crater. increases hope that Perseverance can find them.

In a new study published in Science achievementsa team led by David Page at UCLA shows that: At some point, the Jezero Crater filled with water., depositing layers of sediment on the ground. Subsequently, the lake shrank, and sediment brought by the river that fed it formed a huge delta. As the lake dissipated over time, the crater’s sediments eroded, forming the geological features visible on the surface today.

“From orbit we can see many different deposits, but we cannot say with certainty whether what we see is its original state or we are seeing the end of a long geological history,” Page said in a statement. “To find out how these things formed, we need to look below the surface.”

The rover was the size of a car exploration of a crater about 45 kilometers widestudying its geology and atmosphere and collecting samples from 2021. Soil and rock samples from Perseverance will be returned to Earth by a future expedition and analyzed for signs of life.

Between May and December 2022, Perseverance traveled from the crater floor to the delta, a vast expanse 3 billion year old deposits which from orbit resembles the Earth’s river deltas.

During its journey, the Perseverance Radar Imager for Mars Subsurface Experiment (RIMFAX), released radar waves down at intervals of 10 centimeters. and measured the reflected pulses from a depth of about 20 meters below the surface. This allows scientists to see the base of the sediments.

The images showed two different periods of sediment deposition, sandwiched between two periods of erosion, and that the sediments They are regular and horizontal, like those deposited in lakes on Earth. The existence of lake sediments had been suspected in previous studies but was confirmed by Page’s team.

“The changes we see preserved in the rock deposits are caused by large-scale changes in the Martian environment,” Page concludes. It’s amazing that we see so much evidence of change in such a small geographic area.allowing us to extend our findings to the scale of the entire crater.”

Confirmation of the existence of these lake sediments is that gives hope of finding organic remains in the collected stones, as soon as they return to Earth. But for this you will have to wait a long time, almost 10 years: in 2027 the mission will be launched and will return, if all goes well, in 2033.