Perseverance landed on February 18, and the study looks at long-distance images it captured during its first three months on Mars.Ībout the size of an SUV, it is equipped with 19 cameras, a two metre (seven foot) long robotic arm, two microphones, and a suite of cutting-edge instruments.
"It's really eye-opening to see something no one on Earth has ever seen before," she said. She also expressed wonder at having a window onto an ancient river system on another planet.
Learning that Mars might once have harboured life would be one of the most "profound" discoveries ever made by humanity, Williams said. Their hope is that the samples might at one point have hosted ancient microbial life, evidence of which could have been trapped by salt minerals. Last month mission scientists announced Perseverance had collected two rock samples in Jezero that showed signs they were in contact with groundwater for a long period. Over the course of several years, the multi-tasking rover will collect 30 rock and soil samples in sealed tubes, to be eventually sent back to Earth sometime in the 2030s for lab analysis. "But having these images is like reading a book instead of just looking at the cover."įinding out whether life may have existed on Mars is the main mission of Perseverence, a project that took decades and cost billions of dollars to develop. "From orbital images, we knew it had to be water that formed the delta," Williams said in a press release. The findings will help researchers figure out where to send the rover for soil and rocks that may contain precious "biosignatures" of putative Martian life forms. The top and most recent layers feature boulders measuring more than a metre in diameter scattered about, probably carried there by violent flooding.īut it is the fine-grained sediment of the base layer that will likely be the target of sampling for signs of long-extinct life - if it existed - on Mars. The shape of the bottom three layers showed a presence and steady flow of water early on, indicating Mars was "warm and humid enough to support a hydrologic cycle" about 3.7 billion years ago, the study says. NASA astrobiologist Amy Williams and her team in Florida found similarities between features of the cliffs seen from the crater floor and patterns in Earth's river deltas. Layers within the cliffs reveal how its formation took place. The study in Science analysed high-resolution images captured by Perseverance of the cliffs that were once the banks of the delta. Now that the rover is providing close-ups from the ground, scientists have encountered some geological surprises: /ern4PqRkV6- NASA Mars October 7, 2021
In February, NASA's Perseverance rover landed in Jezero crater, where scientists suspected a long-gone river once fed a lake, depositing sediment in a fan-shaped delta visible from space.įrom space, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and other spacecraft gave us tantalizing hints about Jezero Crater's watery past. Images from Mars reveal how water helped shape the Red Planet's landscape billions of years ago, and provide clues that will guide the search for evidence of ancient life, a study said Thursday.