The discovery made by Perseverance has important implications to understand.
The scientists of the NASA’s Perseverance Mars mission have discovered that the bedrock over which the six-wheeled explorer has been circling has formed from red-hot magma, reports the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in a statement.
The surprising finding was announced Wednesday in the context of the fall congress of the American Geophysical Union, which brought together experts in the field in the American city of New Orleans.
The discovery made by Perseverance has important implications for understanding and accurately dating critical events in the history of the Jezero crater, on Mars, which Perseverance studies, as well as on the rest of the planet, the note cites.
The team has also concluded that the rocks in the crater over which the spacecraft has circulated have interacted with the water several times over a long period of time and that some they contain organic molecules.
Even before Perseverance landed on Mars, the mission’s science team had wondered about the origin of the rocks in the area.
“I was beginning to despair, as I thought we would never find the answer” to this question, said Ken Farley, Keck Foundation Professor of Geochemistry and Perseverance Project Scientist in presenting the discovery.
The situation changed when the Perseverance began using a drill on the end of its robotic arm to scrape off rock surfaces, he added.
“The crystals within the rock provided the conclusive proofFarley said.
Perseverance is armed with a suite of sophisticated instruments that can visualize and analyze these scraped rocks, revealing their composition and mineral content.
The robotic rover Perseverance, which reached Mars last February after nearly seven months of travel from Florida, collected the first sample on Martian soil last September to analyze whether there was ever life on the red planet.
This sample was a piece of rock slightly wider than the thickness of a pencil taken from Jezero crater, which along with about seven more will be part of the Mars Sample Return program, which plans to bring them to Earth by 2031.
The sample, along with others collected by the rover – NASA’s fifth on Mars after Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity y Curiosity– is deposited in one of the 43 hermetic titanium tubes that the ship carries.
Of Perseverance’s 43 sample tubes, six have been sealed to date: four with rock cores, one with a Martian atmosphere, and one containing “core” material to look at any contamination the rover may have brought in from Earth.
NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) are planning a series of future missions to return the rover samples to Earth for further study. (I)
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