![]() The more powerful the flow of water, the more easily it’s able to move larger pieces of material,” said Libby Ives, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which operates the Perseverance rover. “Those indicate a high-energy river that’s truckin’ and carrying a lot of debris. Stitched together from hundreds of images captured by Perseverance’s Mastcam-Z instrument, two new mosaics suggest the latter, revealing important clues: coarse sediment grains and cobbles. One question scientists want to answer is whether that water flowed in relatively shallow streams – closer to what NASA’s Curiosity rover has found evidence of in Gale Crater – or a more powerful river system. Perseverance is exploring the top of a fan-shaped pile of sedimentary rock that stands 820 feet (250 meters) tall and features curving layers suggestive of flowing water. NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover captured this mosaic of a hill nicknamed “Pinestand.” Scientists think the tall sedimentary layers stacked on top of one another here could have been formed by a deep, fast-moving river. Understanding these watery environments could help scientists in their efforts to seek out signs of ancient microbial life that may have been preserved in Martian rock. "But at the same time, the most common way to create these kinds of landforms would be a river.The river was part of a network of waterways that flowed into Jezero Crater, the area the rover has been exploring since landing more than two years ago. "These layers are anomalously tall for rivers on Earth," Ives said. Scientists think these tall layers may also have been formed by a powerful river, although they're exploring other explanations, as well. "Pinestand" is an isolated hill bearing sedimentary layers that curve skyward, some as high as 20 metres. Earth is covered in vegetation that hides these layers."Ī second mosaic captured by Perseverance shows a separate location that is part of the curvilinear unit and about 450 metres from Skrinkle Haven. "We do see deposits like this on Earth, but they're never as well exposed as they are here on Mars. "The wind has acted like a scalpel that has cut the tops off these deposits," said Michael Lamb of Caltech, a river specialist and Perseverance science team collaborator, in the statement. Scientists suspect that after these piles of sediment turned to rock, they were sand blasted by wind over the aeons and carved down to their present size. ![]() ![]() ![]() The layers were likely much taller in the past. They could be the remnants of a river's banks that shifted over time - or the remnants of sandbars that formed in the river. When viewed from the ground, the curved layers appear arranged in rows that ripple out across the landscape. Scientists have previously dubbed a series of curving bands of layered rock within Jezero Crater as "the curvilinear unit."Ī new image from a location within the curvilinear unit, nicknamed 'Skrinkle Haven' proves that the curved layers were formed by powerfully flowing water. The more powerful the flow of water, the more easily it's able to move larger pieces of material," said Libby Ives, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which operates the Perseverance rover, in a statement. "Those indicate a high-energy river that's truckin' and carrying a lot of debris. The images were captured using the Mastcam-Z camera between February 28 and March 9. ![]()
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