The Perseverance rover robot of the American space agency Nasa to explore Mars’ surface has made a surprising discovery. Scientists who look after the mission say the discovery was “completely unexpected”. The scientists believed that the layered rocks that Perseverance took photos of were sedimentary.
NASA‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) said that this discovery could accurately date important events in the history of the Red Planet. JPL noted that where the Perseverance rover is carrying out its findings on the rocks of Jezero Crater. There has been proper evidence of the presence of water.
It suggested that some rocks also contain organic molecules. The results were declared at a news briefing at the American Geophysical Union Fall Science Meeting in New Orleans. Scientists were always looking at the composition of the rocks found on Mars surface. “The crystals within the rock depicted the smoking gun,” said Ken Farley, The scientist who started the perseverance project at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.
The Perseverance rover collected the sample using a drill installed in its robotic arm to understand the rock structure. The rock fragments are ground with a drill; then, X-ray biochemistry is used to map the elemental composition of the rocks.
Since its landing, the Perseverance rover has been exploring a 4sq kilometre patch of the Jezero crater floor searching for a scientifically attractive target to collect rocks from the Mars surface. The rover carries over almost three dozen titanium tubes to collect the sample.
Scientists have discovered the Jezero Crater as an ancient lakebed that gradually dried up as the climate on the Red Planet changed. They sent Perseverance to gather rocks from the crater since evidence of life on Earth is often preserved in the mud and sand deposited at the lake’s bottom.
The Perseverance rover landed on the Jezero Crated earlier this year. It carries the Ingenuity helicopter, which became the first vehicle to fly on Mars under its propulsion system. The copter has so far completed 15 test flights on the Mars surface.
Perseverance had a banner year in 2021, and it will move on to an even more integral territory next year: the ancient river delta. This fan-shaped structure has intrigued scientists for years, and Farley said the rover would arrive at the delta within six or eight months. The rocks in the delta are mostly sedimentary and preserving precious layers of silt from the river that once flowed into the crater’s lake.
And the samples could reveal if organic molecules associated with signs of life, or even microfossils, could be hiding within the remains of the delta. The rover, which landed on Mars surface in 2012, has also discovered organics in its landing site of Gale Crater. Now that Perseverance has detected them, too, “this helps us to understand the environment in which the organics are formed,” said Luther Beegle, SHERLOC principal investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, in a statement.
While much more investigation is needed to determine how these organic molecules were created, scientists hope their presence. That’s because it means that signs of past or present life could be preserved on the Red Planet as well as if life ever existed there. “When these samples are sent to Earth, they will be a source of scientific discovery for many years,” Beegle said.
A key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, paving the way for human exploration of the Red Planet and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock (broken rock and dust). In cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), subsequent NASA missions would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.
