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Rover Images Confirm Jezero Crater is an Ancient Martian Lake

posted by mrpg on Monday October 11 2021, @03:28AM   Printer-friendly
from the fossils! dept.

upstart writes:

Rover images confirm Jezero crater is an ancient Martian lake: The findings include signs of flash flooding that carried huge boulders downstream into the lakebed.:

The first scientific analysis of images taken by NASA's Perseverance rover has now confirmed that Mars' Jezero crater -- which today is a dry, wind-eroded depression -- was once a quiet lake, fed steadily by a small river some 3.7 billion years ago.

The images also reveal evidence that the crater endured flash floods. This flooding was energetic enough to sweep up large boulders from tens of miles upstream and deposit them into the lakebed, where the massive rocks lie today.

[...] "We now have the opportunity to look for fossils," says team member Tanja Bosak, associate professor of geobiology at MIT. "It will take some time to get to the rocks that we really hope to sample for signs of life. So, it's a marathon, with a lot of potential."

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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday October 13 2021, @05:43AM

    by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Wednesday October 13 2021, @05:43AM (#1186593) Homepage
    Your definition of "prove" is not a useful one. A useful one simply implies that the probability of falsity is negligible.

    We've know small steps are doable, as we're seen them done. We know of no mechanism that would prevent small steps from accumulating into large changes, and we've evidence that supports prior large changes. We have a mechanism for it to happen that we know happens, we have no way of preventing it from happening, we've seen what appears to be it happen, and we have no alternative hypothesis with any believability or support at all. If that's not good enough to be considered "proof", then nothing will be. *Nothing*.

    You seem hung up on some simplistic theoretical Popperian model, one so simplified that even Popper wouldn't subscribe to it. (Finding evidence of alternatives that deny the hypothesis would disprove it, so something can be disprovable even if it's not testable.)

    All of astronomy, for thousand of years, has been done this way. Do you think astronomy's not a science?
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