Ancient Mars may have had raging rivers, and there are plenty of signs of liquid water flowing on the Red Planet long ago, but most of this evidence points to lakes, oceans, or relatively moderate currents like the ancient ones discovered by NASA. The Curiosity rover is in a huge crater on Mars.
Perseverance, which was exploring a Martian crater called Lake Jezero, was perched on the bed of a long dead river that looks very different and features coarse grains and pebbles, huge things that can’t be dislodged after they’re done, according to the study. . Makani report.
“These refer to a high-energy river that carries a lot of debris, and the stronger the water flow, the easier it is to move it,” said Libby Ives, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, who directs perseverance. he said in a statement. To move larger pieces of material.”
Perseverance has rounded up some of this new evidence found at a site the mission team called Skrinkle Haven (apparently a reference to a beach in England. NASA officials said the site features curved strips of layered rock that roughly must have been formed by an outflow. water vigorously.
But the nature of the river that carved this landscape is still a matter of debate, and members of the expedition team said that it may have been a meandering river whose banks have changed over time, or a “braided” river characterized by prominent sand barriers.
--In either scenario, the rocky bands could be much taller than they started, but have been shrunk to their current size by sandy Martian winds.
“The wind acted like a scalpel that cut off the tops of these sediments,” Michael Lamb, a collaborator on the Perseverance Science team specializing in rivers at Caltech in Pasadena, said in the same statement.
“We see such deposits on Earth, but they are never detected as well as they are here on Mars,” Lamb added. “The earth is covered with vegetation that hides these layers.”
Possible additional evidence of ancient fast-flowing water comes from Pinestand, a hill 0.28 miles (0.45 km) from Skrinkle Haven. Pinestand contains layers of sedimentary rock, some up to 65 feet (20 m) thick.
