This handout picture taken by NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover and launched on February 8, 2023, reveals a close-up of the rippled textures that was created billions of years in the past as waves flowed upon a shallow lake.
| Photo Credit: AFP
NASA’s Curiosity rover has discovered wave-rippled rocks — proof of an historical lake — in an space of the planet anticipated to be drier, the US area company stated Wednesday.
“This is the best evidence of water and waves that we’ve seen in the entire mission,” stated Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity’s undertaking scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
The rover, which has been exploring Mars since 2012, beamed again gorgeous photos of rippled patterns on the floor of rocks caused by the waves of a shallow lake billions of years in the past.
Curiosity had beforehand discovered proof that lakes as soon as lined components of Mars within the salty minerals left behind after they dried up.
But NASA scientists have been stunned to seek out such stark proof of water within the Gale Crater that the rover is now exploring.
“We’ve climbed through many lake deposits during our mission but have never seen wave ripples this clearly,” Vasavada stated in a press release.
“This was especially surprising because the area we’re in probably formed at a time when Mars was becoming more dry,” he stated.
Curiosity is exploring the foothills of a three-mile (five-kilometer) tall mountain often called Mount Sharp.
The rover has additionally noticed particles in a valley that was washed down by moist landslides on Mount Sharp, NASA stated.
“This landslide debris is probably the most recent evidence of water that we’ll ever see,” Vasavada stated. “It will allow us to study layers higher up on Mount Sharp that we can’t reach.”
NASA stated Mount Sharp gives a type of “Martian timeline” to scientists with the oldest layers on the backside and youngest on the prime.
This permits them to “study how Mars evolved from a planet that was more Earth-like in its ancient past, with a warmer climate and plentiful water, to the freezing desert it is today,” it stated.
Another Mars rover, Perseverance, landed on the Red Planet in February 2021 to search for indicators of previous microbial life.
The multi-tasking rover will accumulate 30 rock and soil samples in sealed tubes to be despatched again to Earth someday within the 2030s for lab evaluation.
