The Curiosity rover of the NASA has found rippled rocks on an area of Mars, evidence of an ancient lake on the red planet, the US space agency reported Wednesday.
“This is the best evidence of water and waves that we’ve seen on the entire mission,” said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. NASAin California.
The rover, which has been roaming Mars since 2012, returned stunning images of wavy patterns on the surface of rocks caused by waves from a shallow lake billions of years ago.
But the scientists of the NASA They were surprised to find such clear evidence of water in Gale Crater, where the rover is now.
“We have climbed through many lake deposits during our mission, but never have we seen wave ripples so clearly,” Vasavada said in a statement.
“This was especially surprising because the area we are in probably formed at a time when Mars was getting drier,” he added.
Curiosity is exploring the slopes of a 5,000 meter high mountain known as Mount Sharp.
The rover has also detected debris in a valley that was swept away by wet landslides on Mount Sharp, the agency said. NASA.
“These pieces of land are probably the most recent evidence of the presence of water that we will ever see,” Vasavada explained. “It will allow us to study higher layers on Mount Sharp that we can’t reach.”
The NASA indicated that Mount Sharp provides a sort of “Martian timeline” to scientists, with the oldest layers at the bottom and the youngest at the top.
This allows them to “study how Mars evolved from a planet that was more Earth-like in its ancient past, with a warmer climate and abundant water, to the frozen desert it is today,” he said.
Another Mars rover, Perseverance, landed on the red planet in February 2021 to search for signs of microbial life in the past.
This multitasking vehicle will collect 30 rock and soil samples in sealed tubes that will be sent to Earth in the 2030s for laboratory analysis.