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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: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 13 2021, @05:29PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 13 2021, @05:29PM (#1186713) Journal

    actually, I think it would be a useful exercise to compare Earth after a major meteor hit with Mars, in terms of survivability. because we're not really talking about taking half of the human population to Mars, only enough to make a self-sustaining colony, right?

    Well, would there be a lot of people on Earth after that disaster? You could indeed be talking about half or more of the human race after a significant enough disaster.

    especially from people like runaway, who doesn't even pretend some goodwill towards humans in general.

    I have to agree with the AC here. What does"goodwill" mean here?

    or people like you who deny that the ongoing climate change and mass extinction are problems worth fixing.

    Why should I agree with your position? I'll note that nobody has made a strong case for urgent climate change mitigation. And most of the present mass extinction happened before human civilization existed.