![]() Billions of years ago, Mars had an atmosphere but it’s always had a rather small magnetic field, so the solar winds from the Sun stripped the atmosphere away over time-leaving it the dry, arid planet we have grown to love. But the story for Mars is a bit more complex. Our own Earth stays wet because we have an atmosphere and a magnetic field, which keeps our planet watery and healthy so we can comfortably survive. Scientists think this is likely due to a very dry period when water evaporated, leaving the salts behind. The rover is driving across Gale Crater, an ancient Martian lake bed that was once filled with water, and has discovered sulfate salts. Just last week, news came out that Curiosity had found something salty. We’ve now been able to narrow down the range of possibilities, but the data we’ve acquired so far suggest that the history of the crater floor may be quite a bit more complicated than we had anticipated.NASA’s Curiosity rover touched down on Mars in August 2012, and it’s been cruising around, shooting lasers at rocks, drilling into the ground, and performing science experiments ever since. ![]() “Before Perseverance landed, there were many hypotheses about the exact nature and origin of the crater floor materials. “RIMFAX is giving us a view of Mars stratigraphy similar to what you can see on Earth in highway road cuts, where tall stacks of rock layers are sometimes visible in a mountainside as you drive by,” Paige explained. Compounding the mystery, within those inclined areas are some perplexing highly reflective rock layers that in fact tilt in multiple directions. The image reveals the presence of ubiquitous layered rock strata, including those that are inclined at up to 15 degrees. The shapes, densities, thicknesses, angles and compositions of underground objects affect how the radar waves bounce back, creating a visual image of what lies beneath.ĭuring Perseverance’s initial 3-kilometer traverse, the instrument has obtained a continuous radar image that reveals the electromagnetic properties and bedrock stratigraphy - the arrangement of rock layers - of Jezero’s floor to depths of 15 meters, or about 49 feet. RIMFAX obtains a picture of underground features by sending bursts of radar waves below the surface, which are reflected by rock layers and other obstacles. Paige said that most of the evidence gathered by the rover so far points to an igneous, or molten, origin, but based on the RIMFAX data, he and the team can’t yet say for certain how the inclined layers formed. They could have been formed when molten rock rose up towards the surface, or, alternatively, they could represent an older delta deposit buried in the crater floor.” The fact that they are tilted like this requires a more complex geologic history. “We were expecting to see horizontal rocks on the crater floor. “We were quite surprised to find rocks stacked up at an inclined angle,” said David Paige, a UCLA professor of Earth, planetary and space sciences and one of the lead researchers on the Radar Imager for Mars Subsurface Experiment, or RIMFAX. As the rover gathers more data, the researchers hope to clear up the complex history of this part of the Red Planet.ĭavid Paige, deputy principal investigator for Perseverance’s RIMFAX instrument. Perseverance is currently exploring a delta on the western edge of the crater, where a river once fed the lake, leaving behind a large deposit of dirt and rocks it picked up along its course. The slopes, thicknesses and shapes of the inclined sections suggest they were either formed by slowly cooling lava or deposited as sediments in the former lake. In a paper published today in the journal Science Advances, a research team led by UCLA and the University of Oslo reveals that rock layers beneath the crater’s floor, observed by the rover’s ground-penetrating radar instrument, are unexpectedly inclined. The rover, which is about the size of car and carries seven scientific instruments, has been probing Mars’ 30-mile-wide Jezero crater, once the site of a lake and an ideal spot to search for evidence of ancient life and information about the planet’s geological and climatic past. Probing the past. The variations could indicate past lava flows or possibly a river delta even older than the one currently being explored on the crater floor.Īfter a tantalizing year-and-a-half wait since NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover touched down on our nearest planetary neighbor, new data is arriving - and bringing with it a few surprises.What lies beneath. The rover’s subsurface radar experiment, co-led by UCLA’s David Paige, has returned images showing unexpected variations in rock layers beneath the Jezero crater.Roving the Red Planet. Perseverance landed on Mars in February 2021 and has been gathering data on the planet's geology and climate and searching for signs of ancient life..
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