“This is useful because one of the big unknowns on Mars is time,” Lapôtre said. This illustration depicts NASA’s Perseverance rover operating on the surface of Mars. Based on the strength of Mars’ gravity, and assuming the Red Planet did not have plants, the scientists estimate that the delta in Jezero crater took at least 20 to 40 years to form, but that formation was likely discontinuous and spread out across about 400,000 years. The study incorporates a recent discovery the researchers made about Earth: Single-threaded sinuous rivers that don’t have plants growing over their banks move sideways about ten times faster than those with vegetation. The new research, published online on April 23 in AGU Advances, offers guidance for sample recovery in order to better understand the ancient Martian climate and duration of the delta formation for NASA’s Perseverance Rover to Mars, which is expected to launch in July 2020 as part of the first Mars sample return mission. But without an understanding of the rates and durations of delta-building events, the analogy remained speculative. Jezero crater was selected for NASA’s next rover mission partly because the site contains a river delta, which on Earth are known to effectively preserve organic molecules associated with life. “We showed that sediments were deposited rapidly and that if there were organics, they would have been buried rapidly, which means that they would likely have been preserved and protected.” “There probably was water for a significant duration on Mars and that environment was most certainly habitable, even if it may have been arid,” according to lead author Mathieu Lapôtre, an assistant professor of geological sciences at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth). By modeling the length of time it took to form the layers of sediment in a delta deposited by an ancient river as it poured into the crater, researchers have concluded that if life once existed near the Martian surface, traces of it could have been captured within the delta layers. A new analysis of satellite imagery supports that hypothesis. Scientists have speculated that the Jezero crater on Mars – the site of the next NASA rover mission to the Red Planet – could be a good place to look for markers of life. The image was taken by instruments on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which regularly captures potential landing sites for future missions. NASA’s Mars Perseverance Rover, expected to launch in July 2020, will land in Jezero crater, pictured here.
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