Written by Munis Hawass Sunday, February 4, 2024 12:00 PM NASA’s eye spotted in the sky Mars Evidence of dry primordial rivers on Mars. The space agency’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured a snapshot of another time, billions of years ago, when water flowed on the temperate surface of Mars. NASA recently published the image in Planetary Photojournal.
“This image of the hills on Aeolis Planum tells the story of ancient rivers and Mars that are very different from those of today,” NASA wrote online. “The sinuous shapes you see below are the result of water filling these rivers with gravel, while fine grains surrounded the waterway when Its banks overflowed.
“The dangerous river bed and the fine grains surrounding it can lead to a strange phenomenon that geologists call inverted channels,” the agency explained. “After the river disappears, the fine surrounding areas can easily erode, leaving the dangerous river bed as a series of high hills.”
The long-developed geological finding shows where ancient rivers once flowed across Mars. NASA’s spacecraft captured this image from about 166 miles above the high plains of Mars. This Martian satellite carries a large camera, aptly called the Imaging Experiment. High Resolution, or HIRISE, which captures such detailed images.
Unlike Earth, Mars has largely lost its atmosphere, making it an extremely dry desert world. Mars today is 1,000 times drier than the driest desert on Earth, and its irradiated surface creates a harsh environment for life to survive, but NASA’s Perseverance rover, which is the size of a car, is currently scanning the surface of the red planet for possible signs of life. Past primitiveness – if it existed at all.
In the future, other rovers may join NASA’s Mars satellite and rovers in the hunt. The space agency has begun investigating the possibility of creating a small-scale Mars rover, a vehicle that might one day swoop down at about 135 miles per hour over the Martian desert. One day, pioneering astronauts may set foot on the red soil of Mars, too.
