With the help of China’s Zhurong rover, scientists have gathered new evidence that Mars once had an ocean billions of years ago – a far cry from today’s dry and desolate world.
Data obtained by the Zhurong spacecraft, which landed and orbited in the northern lowlands of Mars in 2021, has indicated the presence of geological features indicating an ancient coastline, scientists said Thursday. The rover analyzed rock at a location on the surface of Mars called Utopia Planitia, a large plain in the planet’s northern hemisphere.
The researchers said data from China’s Tianwen-1 orbiter, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and a robotic six-wheeled rover indicate the existence of a water ocean during a period when Mars may have already been cold and dry and its Most of the atmosphere would have been lost.
He described surface features such as troughs, sediment channels and mud volcanic formations indicative of coastlines, with evidence of both shallow and deep marine environments.
“We estimate that the Flood in Utopia Planitia on Mars occurred about 3.68 billion years ago. The ocean surface froze over a geologically short period of time,” said planetary scientist Bo Wu of Hong Kong Polytechnic University, lead author of the study published in the journal Nature. Was.” Scientific report.
The researchers said the ocean appears to have disappeared about 3.42 billion years ago.
“The water was heavily silted up, creating a layered structure of deposits,” said study co-author Sergei Krasilnikov, a planetary scientist at Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Like Earth and the other planets in our solar system, Mars was formed about 4.5 billion years ago. At the time the ocean apparently existed, it would have begun its transition even before it became a hospitable planet.
“The presence of an ancient ocean on Mars has been proposed and studied for many decades, yet significant uncertainty remains,” Wu said. “These findings not only provide further evidence to support the theory of a Martian ocean, but also offer, for the first time, a discussion on its possible evolutionary scenario.”
Water is seen as a key ingredient for life, and the past presence of oceans raises the possibility that Mars was capable of harboring microbial life at least at one time.
“Early in Mars’ history, when it probably had a dense, warm atmosphere, the potential for microbial life was very high,” Krasilnikov said.
The solar-powered Zhurong, named after the mythological Chinese fire god, began its work on the surface of Mars in May 2021 using six scientific instruments and will go into hibernation in May 2022, presumably in the sand and Found with excessive accumulation of dust, according to the mission designer. This exceeded the three-month duration of its original mission.
Researchers have tried to better understand what happened to all the water that once existed on the surface of Mars. Another study published in August, which was based on seismic data obtained by NASA’s robotic InSight lander, indicated that a vast reservoir of liquid water may exist within fractured igneous rocks beneath the surface.
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