The Perseverance rover has produced the first photographic evidence of a huge, long-dead river on Mars, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has announced.
NASA’s probe showed the river “was deeper and faster-moving than scientists have ever seen evidence for in the past,” the agency declared in a Thursday release.
“The river was part of a network of waterways that flowed into Jezero Crater, the area the rover has been exploring since landing more than two years ago,” the group noted.
Two new photo mosaics which were “stitched together from hundreds of images captured by Perseverance’s Mastcam-Z instrument” revealed “coarse sediment grains and cobbles” — evidence, scientists say, of a more powerful river system than the “relatively shallow streams” previously discovered by the Curiosity rover.
One researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which operates the Perseverance rover, said the clues “indicate a high-energy river that’s truckin’ and carrying a lot of debris.”
“The more powerful the flow of water, the more easily it’s able to move larger pieces of material,” explained the scientist, who added: “It’s been a delight to look at rocks on another planet and see processes that are so familiar.”