Nasa’s Perseverance rover has made a remarkable discovery on Mars.
The exploratory rover, launched in 2020, found the remains of an ancient river delta buried deep beneath Mars’ surface, offering one of the oldest proof about the presence of water on the planet that continues to be the centre of attention when it comes to space exploration.
Using ground-penetrating radar, a tool that sends pulses of energy into the ground and reads what bounces back, the rover detected geological features as deep as 115 feet underground.
It did this while travelling 6.1 kilometres across Jezero Crater, a large bowl-shaped depression in Mars’s Northern Hemisphere that scientists believe was once a lake.
WHAT DID NASA FIND ON MARS?
Perseverance spotted layered sediments and eroded surfaces typical of a delta environment.
The rover found the wide, fan-shaped area of land that forms where a river meets a lake or sea. Researchers estimate that this now-buried delta is roughly 3.7 to 4.2 billion years old, making it one of the oldest water-related features ever found on Mars.
The discovery is significant because it points to a delta system that existed even before the one currently visible at the surface, and adds weight to the theory that water was present on Mars for a longer period than what the surface alone suggests.
WHY WATER ON MARS MATTER?
Water is considered the basic building block for life as we know it. An extended water history on Mars widens the window of opportunity for life to have once emerged there.
Researchers also noted that the fine-layered underground structures could have preserved traces of past biological activity, what scientists call biosignatures.
The data were collected using Perseverance’s RIMFAX instrument between September 2023 and February 2024, over 250 Martian days, equal to 257.6 days back on Earth. The collected data also represents the deepest underground scan the tool has performed so far.
“It’s very exciting that RIMFAX was able to provide such a detailed view of these deposits, and thus help solve the puzzle of their origin,” David Paige, a UCLA planetary scientist and a member of the Perseverance rover science team, told news agency Reuters. “This further cements the notion that ground-penetrating radar is indeed an extremely valuable new tool for studying planetary geology.”
The findings have been published in the journal Science Advances.
