NASA’s Perseverance rover has reached a great moment in its mission to Mars. Today he begins the ascent to an ancient delta in the crater where he landed and will examine rocks that seem to have the best chance of preserving evidence of life on the planet.
On the way back, Perseverance will collect some of these rocks, placing the specimens at the base of the delta which will be recovered from later missions.
The goal is to bring this material back to Earth in the 2030s for detailed inspection.
“The delta at Jezero Crater is Perseverance’s main astrobiological target,” said Dr Katie Stack Morgan, the project’s deputy scientist.
“These are the rocks that we believe probably have the greatest potential to contain signs of ancient life and can also tell us about the climate of Mars and how it has evolved over time,” he told BBC News.
In the case of Jezero, scientists believe that a crater-sized lake probably existed billions of years ago.
“Rivers flowing into the delta will carry nutrients that are beneficial to life, and then the fine-grained sediment that is carried and deposited at a high rate is good for conservation,” said mission scientist Professor Sanjeev Gupta of Imperial College. London.
“Also, if there is life inland, it can go down to the river and concentrate in the delta.”
“The rover has an amazing array of instruments that can tell us about the chemistry, mineralogy and structure of the delta, looking at sediments down to the scale of a grain of salt,” said mission scientist Briony Horgan of Purdue University. in Indiana.
“We will learn about the chemistry of this ancient lake, if its waters were acidic or neutral, if it was a habitable environment and what kind of life it could support. To be clear, no one knows if life on Mars ever began, but if it did, the three or four rocks that Perseverance chooses to consider on the way back to the crater could be the ones to reveal it to us. . »
NASA, together with the European Space Agency, is at an advanced stage of planning the missions required, but it still has many years of work ahead of it.
BBC
Follow Skai.gr on Google News
and be the first to know all the news
I have over 8 years of experience in the news industry. I have worked for various news websites and have also written for a few news agencies. I mostly cover healthcare news, but I am also interested in other topics such as politics, business, and entertainment. In my free time, I enjoy writing fiction and spending time with my family and friends.
