The Jezero crater is perhaps the evidence in our search for Martian life.
If everything goes according to plan, NASA’s Perseverance Rover will catch fire on Thursday (February 18) at the site to begin its perennial quest to look for signs of habitability and especially store promising rocks for a future monster-return mission to bring to Earth’s laboratories.
The choice of the place that Percy is going to investigate was a “complete” process, NASA said in a statement, which requires five years of research to investigate 60 candidate locations. Mars possesses abundant evidence of water and organic molecules, making it difficult to choose one place to answer the scientific questions that the Mars 2020 mission answers.
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But NASA determined that Jezero was a good place to show how water appears from time to time and then disappears on the Martian surface. Scientists believe that Mars lost its water because the atmosphere became too thin, but about 3.5 billion years ago it appears that Jezero was a potentially habitable river valley.
“Scientists see evidence that water transports clay minerals from the surrounding area into the crater lake,” NASA representatives wrote in a description of the site. “The microbial life could possibly have lived in Jezero. If so, signs of their excess could be found in sediments on the lake or on the shore. Scientists will study how the region formed and developed, looking for signs of past lives and monsters of Mars rock and soil that can preserve these signs. ‘
When NASA chose Jezero in 2018, scientists said that a delta is usually an ideal place to look for signs of ancient life, which would probably be microbial.
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“A Delta is very good at preserving bio-signatures, [be they] evidence of life that may have existed in the lake, or at the boundary between the sediment and the lake, or possibly things that lived in the main body of water, that were swept away by the river and deposited in the delta, “March 2020 project scientist Ken Farley, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said during a conference held that November.
The Jezero crater is about 18 degrees north of the Martian equator and shows a large variety of geology, allowing scientists to look at different rocks that may represent the evolution of the planet over the era. The disadvantage of the terrain, however, is that the complicated terrain poses danger during landing with obstacles such as sand dunes. The scientists also wanted to avoid touching the delta itself.
Jezero long ago contained a deep lake that was about the size of Lake Tahoe. The mission plan requires perseverance to land on the edge of the crater. The wanderer will wander to the delta to explore the sediments before exploring the ancient shore and finally looking at some rocks at the edge of the crater.
“These rocks would have been hot shortly after impact and could have provided hot springs,” said scientist Ken Farley of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in a December 2018 video based on images collected by Mars orbits. is. “Deposits from these fountains would be another target in our search for possible ancient life on Mars.”
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