NASA rover finds place where ‘exciting’ events occurred on Mars

Once upon a time, a great flood cascaded down the towering mountains of Mars.

And NASA’s dusty Curiosity Rover There is evidence.

Car size National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) The robot spent much of 2024 exploring Gediz Canyon, a dried-up waterway that drains Mount Sharp, three miles above sea level. Mars Today is 1,000 Double drying Dryer than the driest deserts on Earth, the probe has found clues that the Red Planet experienced a massive flood long ago. Wet World.

“It hasn’t been a quiet time on Mars,” says Becky Williams, a scientist at the Mars Science Institute. Planetary Science Institute “We’ve seen a lot of activity here, and we’ve observed multiple flows through the channels, including active floods and rocky flows,” he said in a statement, using the rover’s mast camera to study Mars.

The image below shows what Curiosity has recently discovered.

The photo below is a wide-angle view of part of Gediz Canyon leading to Mount Sharp. There are prominent piles of rocks and boulders, such as the one in the foreground on the left. “The area was likely formed by a massive flood of water and debris, which created mountains of rock within the channel.” NASA explainsAmazingly, this pile of debris extends about two miles down the mountain (though some of it may have also been caused by a landslide).

Curiosity also took a closer look at rocks that were rolled into the water, many of which have a distinctive “halo” pattern, as seen in the image below. “Eventually, the water seeped into all the material that was deposited here,” he said. space “A chemical reaction with the water caused a white ‘halo’-like shape to appear on some of the rocks,” the agency explained.

In the center, a Martian rock shows a distinct “halo” formed by interaction with ancient water.
Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS

Unlike EarthMars no longer has an insulating atmosphere: the hot metallic core deep beneath the Red Planet’s surface cooled long ago, and with no heated interior to generate a protective magnetic field, this once water-rich world is now exposed to a constant stream of particles from the Sun. Solar windThe solar wind gradually strips Mars of its thick atmosphere. The cold, unforgiving, radioactive desert we see today.

The Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars in 2012, continues to explore Mars to see if there is an environment on the planet where microbial life can exist. Perseverance roverThe Mars rover, which landed in 2020, is equipped with instruments that will look for traces of past life known as “biosignatures” — telltale elements, substances or characteristics of ancient life. This could mean molecular chains or structures that were almost certainly produced by single-celled Martians.

Although it’s clear that Mars once contained abundant water, robotic Mars rovers have so far found no evidence that water ever existed on the rocky world. life.