© Image credit: NASA/JPL-CaltechAn artist's depiction of NASA's Mars 2020 rover, Perseverance, storing samples of Martian rocks in tubes for future delivery to Earth. Perseverance will land inside Mars' Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021.
NASA's
Perseverance rover has found that
Mars' Jezero crater was at one point filled with water, offering a tantalizing hope that it may have already unearthed fossilized life on the planet.
The rover, which
first touched down on the crater in February 2021 along with its
now-retired helicopter companion Ingenuity, made the discovery using ground-penetrating radar โ revealing layers of sediment once belonging to a lake that later dried into a gigantic delta.
The finding raises hopes that, once
geological samples Perseverance has collected from the crater return to Earth, researchers may find evidence that ancient life once thrived on the now desiccated Red Planet. The researchers published their findings Jan. 26 in the journal
Science Advances.
"From orbit we can see a bunch of different deposits, but we can't tell for sure if what we're seeing is their original state, or if we're seeing the conclusion of a long geological story," lead study author
David Paige, a professor of planetary science at UCLA,
said in a statement. "To tell how these things formed, we need to see below the surface."
NASA's
Perseverance rover is a key part of the space agency's $2.7 billion Mars 2020 mission. Since it arrived on Mars, the rover,
alongside the older Curiosity rover, has been searching for signs of ancient life on the Martian surface by trundling across the 30-mile (48 kilometers) Jezero crater, collecting dozens of rock samples for eventual return to Earth.
For three years, the rover was accompanied by the Ingenuity helicopter, which performed its 72nd and final flight over the Martian surface on Jan. 18.
The car-sized
Perseverance is packed with seven scientific instruments, one of which is the Radar Imager for Mars' Subsurface Experiment (RIMFAX). By firing radar pings into the ground every 4 inches (10 centimeters) along its long and lonely journey, the rover built a map of pulses reflected from depths of about 66 feet (20 meters) below the Martian crater's surface.
Now,
this radar map has revealed the existence of sediments โ suspected by past studies but never previously confirmed โ that suggest the crater was once flooded with the waters of a gigantic lake. Much like in drying lakes on Earth, its sediments were transported by a river that formed a large delta, before later being deposited and weathered by two distinct phases of erosion."The changes we see preserved in the rock record are driven by large-scale changes in the Martian environment," Paige said. "It's cool that we can see so much evidence of change in such a small geographic area, which allows us to extend our findings to the scale of the entire crater."
Since life on
Earth is highly dependent on water, evidence of
water on Mars could be a vital clue that the planet was once home to life โ or that life could still be there.
But evidence for life on the inhospitable neighboring planet has been elusive.
To return
Perserverance's precious cargo, the
Perseverance rover will await the arrival of the
European Space Agency's (ESA) planned Sample Retrieval Lander โ a spacecraft packaged with a small rocket that the rover will load with its rock and soil samples before it is fired back into orbit.
After being launched into space, the rocket containing the sample will be collected by the ESA's Earth-return orbiter (ERO) for a return flight to Earth. NASA initially planned for the ERO to launch sometime in 2026, but this date has since been
pushed back to 2028, meaning that the sample will be back on Earth in 2033 at the earliest.
(Thao, the author's mentor during his abduction, discussing the arrival of the first humans โ the Black and Bsian races - from a planet in the constellation Centaur โ 1.35 million years ago, when they settled in the area of Australia and Burma)
โAs I said earlier, the people [Blacks & Asians] knew that their planet was going to become uninhabitable within 500 years. Knowing there were other planets, inhabited and inhabitable, in the galaxy, they mounted one of the most serious exploratory expeditions.
Eventually, they penetrated your solar system, first visiting Mars which was known to be inhabitable and which, at that time in fact was inhabited.
The human beings on Mars had no technology but, by contrast, they were spiritually highly evolved. They were very small people measuring in height between 120cm to 150cm, and of Mongoloid [Asian] type. They lived in tribes in huts of stone.
The fauna of Mars was scarce. There was a kind of dwarf goat, some very large hare-like creatures, several species of rat and the largest animal resembled a buffalo but had the head like a tapir. There were also some birds and three species of snakes, one of which was quite venomous. The flora was also poor, trees attaining no more than four meters in height. They had too, an edible grass that you might compare with buckwheat.
The [explorers] conducted their research, realizing soon that Mars was also cooling down at a rate which indicated that it would no longer be inhabitable in four to five thousand years. In terms of it's flora and fauna, it was barely rich enough to sustain those already living there, let alone cope with an emigrant mass from [another world]. Besides, the planet did not appeal to them.
[These explorers did land on Earth and eventually 3.6 million of each race emigrated to Earth.]
Their original home planet eventually cooled down as predicted, and became a desert, much like Mars.
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