The Perseverance rover is exploring Martian Jezero Crater as part of its mission to search for evidence of ancient life on Mars. The history of water is central to the search for life, and Mars is now thought to have lost water around 4 million years ago. before
The rover has found evidence of what was once one of the deepest, most flowing rivers ever discovered on the planet.
Using the Mastcam-Z instrument, the rover took a series of hundreds of images that were stitched together into a mosaic of the hill’s structure called Pinestand.
In the photo you can see many layers left by the flowing river, which were formed from sediment.
Digitartlands reported that the way the sedimentary rock was formed shows that the river flowing through the area was fast and powerful.
“He points to a high-energy river that comes in with trucks and carries a lot of debris.
“The stronger the water current, the easier it is to move larger pieces of material,” Libby Ives of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a statement. “It was interesting to look at other planetary rocks and see very familiar processes.”
Evidence of a river can also be seen in this mosaic of nearby rocks that have a striped structure.
“The wind acts like a scalpel, cutting off the ends of these sediments,” says Michael Lamb, a member of the Persistence Sciences team at Caltech. We see deposits like this on Earth, but they are never exposed like they are here on Mars. The ground is covered with vegetation that hides these layers.
The images were taken while Perseverance was exploring an area of the crater, the site of an ancient river delta. This feature is one of the reasons why Jezero is such a promising place to explore. For proof of life
“What’s exciting here is that we’re entering a new phase in Jezero’s history,” said Cathy Stack Morgan of JPL. This is the first time we’ve seen such environments on Mars.” “We think of rivers on a different scale than we used to.”
