Perseverance robot discovered that the rocky Earth contains lava compounds (Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
or rover determinationGive NASA, landed in Mars 10 months ago and she actually promoted some surprising revelations. The new discovery of the robot is that the rocky soil of the planet was previously formed from lava flows. The announcement came during the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in New Orleans, USA.
Scientists’ analysis showed that olivine crystals are surrounded by pyroxene, both of which indicate volcanic origin. For researchers, this is “completely unexpected” information, according to the US network CNN. Prior to this, they believed that the rock layers were sedimentary, from materials deposited by an ancient river.
The samples obtained by perseverance also show evidence of the presence of water and even organic molecules. These results allow us to create an accurate timeline of what happened at Jezero Crater, the site of an ancient lake on the planet, and thus better understand the history of Mars.
The main tool in the new evidence for Mars was the fact that the robot used a drill at the end of its arm to scrape the surfaces of rocks. “The crystals inside the rock gave us the answer,” Ken Farley, a perseverance project scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., says in a statement.
Perseverance has a series of complex tools for analyzing the obtained material. One is PIXL, or the Planetary X-ray Lithochemistry Instrument, which detects mineral content.
The team now wants to know whether the rocks containing olivine were formed by a lake of lava that would have cooled or by underground lava from an ancient volcano that would have been eroded. “We expect the floor of the original crater to be much deeper than we are now,” Farley adds.
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