DECRYPTION – The rover’s analyzes bring the first geological surprises to the Jezero crater.
For nearly two years, NASA’s Perseverance rover has been criss-crossing the Martian crater Jezero, site of an ancient lake. If one of the final objectives of the mission is to take rock samples in order to bring them back to Earth, the rover communicates daily with our planet and sends the results of the analyzes carried out with its instruments. A new series of articles has just been published in the journals Science et Science Advancesand gives some keys to understanding the geological history of the crater.
Remember that this landing place was not chosen at random. Located in the northern hemisphere of the red planet, the Jezero crater, with a diameter of 35 km, was filled with water 3.6 billion years ago, which makes it a particularly interesting site for the search for ancient traces of life.
We expected sedimentary rocks characteristic of ancient lakes, but in fact they are igneous rocks
Olivier Beyssac, CNRS research director at Sorbonne University and co-author of this work
The published studies relate to the floor at the bottom of the crater, where the robot landed in February 2021, and they compile results from three of the instruments…
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