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Far away, alone in a crater on a planet inhabited only by robots, NASA's Perseverance rover explores a dry landscape that was once a river system billions of years ago.instrument has now probed deeper than ever beneath the Jezero crater, revealing a vast delta system fed by flowing water that existed long before the one the rover now explores.
In turn, this indicates that water flowed across the surface of Mars for much longer than the surface alone implies – a finding with important implications for the planet's past habitability. A composite of the ground-penetrating radar data and a digital elevation model constructed from satellite data. The cyan lines show where underground features match the surface. long. Those measurements penetrated to depths greater than 35 meters . As the researchers began to piece together the data, a hidden deltaic landscape unfolded from the darkness. The radar data revealed many layers of rock extending deep underground, arranged in sloping patterns that on Earth are typical of sediment settling out of water as it flows into a wide basin. The researchers also identified lobe and channel structures consistent with formation by flowing water. Although the radar only probes tens of meters underground at any one location, combining those measurements across the entire length of Perseverance's traverse allows scientists to reconstruct a much thicker deposit.This combined measurement suggests that the Margin could be up to 90 meters thick, the result of multiple episodes of deposition, with evidence of some erosion between them. Based on the geological context of Jezero crater, the researchers estimated that the region hosted a functional delta system as early as the Noachian, some 4.2 to 3.7 billion years ago. Taken together, the evidence suggests that Mars did not host water only during a brief period, but experienced multiple phases of water flowing over and shaping its surface. That extended water history opens the window of opportunity for life to have emerged. "This work also may have implications for the preservation of potential biosignatures and habitability in the subsurface of Jezero crater," "Fine-scale internal structures could preserve mineral compositions and geochemical conditions of past water-related events and may have once provided past habitable conditions."
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