Dallas, TX, United States, 09/16/2021 / News Bureau /
“It looks like our first rocks reveal a potentially habitable sustained environment,” the project scientist for the mission, Ken Farley, stated in a statement on Friday. “It’s a big deal that the water was there for a long time.”
On September 6, the six-wheeled robot gathered its first sample called “Montdenier,” followed by the second, called “Montagnac,” on September 8, both from the same rock.
A pencil’s width in diameter and roughly six centimeters in length, both samples are now contained in sealed tubes in the inside of the rover.
Perseverance failed in its initial effort to obtain a sample in early August because the rock was too brittle to stand the drill.
Perseverance has been working in the Jezero Crater, which was home to a lake 3.5 billion years ago when temperatures on Mars were much warmer and wetter than they are now.
The first samples were discovered to be basaltic in nature and presumably the result of lava flows. Minerals found in volcanic rocks can be used for radiometric dating.
In turn, this might help scientists put together the area’s geological history, including when the crater formed, when the lake emerged and dissolved, as well as how temperature evolved through time.
“An interesting thing about these rocks as well is that they show signs for sustained interaction with groundwater,” NASA geologist Katie Stack Morgan said at a news briefing. “If these rocks experienced water for long periods of time, there may be habitable niches within these rocks that could have supported ancient microbial life,” Morgan Stack.
In addition to knowing there was a lake, scientists couldn’t rule out the idea that it had been a “flash in the pan,” with floods filling it up for only 50 years. Because of this, they are more confident that groundwater has been there a long time.
During a combined trip with the European Space Agency, NASA hopes to bring the samples to Earth for in-depth laboratory analysis sometime in the 2030s.
Source: Submit123News