Enhanced picture face of mars1/8/2023 The boulders on top contain flood deposits Within its cliff face, they observed metres of sloping rock beds sandwiched between horizontal layers that indicate rocky deposits from the ancient delta. ![]() The Perseverance science team detected a prominent hill, which they called Kodiak, near the scarp and discovered it contained distinctive geological structures. The scarp contains the remnants of a river delta that formed where a 120-mile-long ancient river and a 21-mile-wide lake join. About a month later, the rover’s Mastcam-Z cameras and Remote Micro-Imager (RMI) zoomed in for a closer look at one of the crater’s most massive geologic features, the ‘Delta Scarp’. Perseverance landed at Jezero Crater on 18 February 2021. Kodiak moment The finest grained material at the bottom of the delta probably contains our best bet for finding evidence of organics and biosignatures Professor Sanjeev Gupta Department of Earth Science and Engineering The paper on Perseverance’s imaging of Jezero Crater’s Delta Escarpment, the first since it landed, is published in Science. The researchers involved are excited to see how the findings could help Perseverance achieve its scientific missions: finding signs of bygone life and collecting samples for future return to Earth. The lake in the crater – Lake Jezero – could have been up to 40km wide and tens of metres deep. The pictures also suggest where the rover might best hunt for samples, including those that may contain signs of past life, known as biosignatures.īillions of years ago, when Mars had an atmosphere thick enough to support water flowing across its surface, river flows carried sand and gravel from the surrounding highlands towards Jezero’s fan-shaped river delta. The images reveal that the watery life cycle of the now dried-out lake at Jezero Crater - the site of Perseverance’s touchdown - is more intriguing and complicated than originally thought. The NASA Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars in February, has sent back its first images of a 3.7-billion-year-old ancient river delta. Delta fan, Kodiak hill and landing site in Jezero crater
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