The Perseverance robot discovered that the rocky ground contains volcanic lava compounds (Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
Or rover Perseverance, gives Nasa, landed in Mars 10 months ago and has already promoted some surprising revelations. The robot’s new discovery is that the planet’s rocky soil was once formed by volcanic lava flows. The announcement was made during the Autumn Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in New Orleans, USA.
The scientists’ analysis showed olivine crystals surrounded by pyroxene, both pointing to a volcanic origin. For scholars, this is “completely unexpected” information, according to the American network CNN. Before, they believed that the rock layers were sedimentary, of material deposited by an ancient river.
The samples obtained by Perseverance also show evidence of water and even organic molecules. These findings allow us to create an accurate timeline of what happened in Jezero Crater, the site of an ancient lake on the planet, and thus better understand the history of Mars.
A key tool in the new evidence for Mars was the fact that the robot used a drill at the end of its arm to scrape rock surfaces. “The crystals inside the rock gave us the answer,” says Ken Farley, Perseverance project scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., in a statement.
Perseverance has a series of sophisticated instruments to analyze the materials obtained. One is the PIXL, or Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry, which reveals mineral content.
Now the team wants to know whether the rocks containing olivine were formed by a lake of lava that would have cooled or by underground lava from an ancient volcano that would have been exposed to erosion. “We expect the original crater floor to be significantly deeper than where we are now,” adds Farley.
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