NASA’s Perseverance rover corroborates, as the orbital images already pointed out, that the Jezero crater on Mars had habitable conditions more than 3,000 million years ago. Three of its instruments confirm that it had liquid water and carbonates in a sedimentary geological environment rich in organic compounds.
Jezero Crater on Mars was selected as the landing site for the Perseverance rover because images from orbiters (such as NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, or ESA’s Mars Express mission) suggested that it harbored a lake billions of years ago. In fact, there are still signs that there was a delta at the end of one of its entrance channels.
The SHERLOC instrument of @NASAPersevere has allowed the identification of aromatic organic compounds in the rocks of the Jezero crater from two different ancient aqueous environments @C_Astrobiology @Cornell
By @enriquesinc https://t.co/ObpciA7GSz
— SINC (@agencia_sinc) November 24, 2022
Three articles are published this week in Science and Science Advances offering new results collected by Perseverance in this Martian crater and all point to the possibility that it was habitable in the past. The data has been collected with three instruments: the Mastcam-Z camera system and the PIXL and SHERLOC spectrometers.
One of the authors of the three papers, Alberto González Fairén, a researcher at the Center for Astrobiology (CSIC-INTA) and Cornell University in New York (USA), explains to SINC that the in situ analysis of the rover at Jezero “has revealed great quantity of details that were not appreciable from the orbiters” and that can be summarized in five points.
Igneous rocks at the bottom of the crater and sedimentary rocks in the delta
“Second, the PIXL data indicates that the rocks at the bottom of the crater are igneous. [se originan cuando se enfría y solidifica el magma, como las volcánicas] and that they were formed before there were a river, a lake and a delta there,” says González Fairén. Therefore, by combining data from Mastcam-Z and PIXL, two types of materials have been identified at Jezero: igneous rocks at the bottom of the crater, and sedimentary deposits in the delta.”
The new Perseverance analyzes support the picture that Jezero crater formed a habitable site more than 3 billion years ago, containing liquid water and carbonate precipitation in a sedimentary geologic environment rich in organic compounds.
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Source: SINC
