NASA ’s Mars rover probes ancient shorelines for signs of life

THE WOODLANDS, TEXAS— After a few years of hard labor on Mars, you could excuse the Perseverance rover for taking a trip to the beach. For the past few months, NASA’s rover, which is collecting rock samples to eventually send to Earth, has explored a ring of rocks just inside the rim of Jezero crater, which is thought to have been filled with water billions of years ago. An initial analysis suggests the rocks are composed of rounded grains of carbonate, a mineral that precipitates out of water. It’s a promising sign that the rocks were once beachfront property, says Briony Horgan, a planetary scientist at Purdue University who leads the rover’s science campaign. “You can imagine the waves crashing up against the shores of an ancient paleolake,” she says. The finding, presented this week here at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, offers the rover a second rock type with an excellent chance of preserving signs of past life, beyond the rocks of the mission’s main target: a fossilized river delta that spills into the crater. On Earth, carbonate-rich shores often contain structures built by microbes, such as stromatolites, bumpy mounds built up by bacteria, and ooids, concentric carbonate grains often formed by microbial interactions. The rim rocks also mark a milestone on the rover’s 3-year journey—and perhaps the approach of its turnaround point. Since landing on the floor of Jezero crater, Perseverance ...
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