Strange Signal on Mars Reveals New Clues to The Red Planet's Hidden Past
01 September 2022
ByMATT WILLIAMS, UNIVERSE TODAY
Artist’s impression of what Jezero Crater may once have looked like billions of years ago. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
On 18 February 2021, the Perseverance rover landed in the Jezero Crater on Mars.
Since then, Perseverance has been exploring the region in search for evidence of past (and possibly present) life – much like its cousin, the Curiosity rover. This includes obtaining samples that will be placed in a cache and retrieved by a future ESA/NASA sample-return mission.
These will be the first directly-retrieved samples of Martian rock and soil that will be analyzed in a laboratory on Earth, which are expected to reveal some tantalizing bits about the history of the red planet. But it appears that we don't need to wait on the sample-return mission since the Perseverance rover is already sending some surprising data back to Earth.
According to a new study by a research team led by the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and the University of Oslo, Perseverance's ground-penetrating radar detected that the rock layers beneath the crater are strangely inclined.
More:
https://www.sciencealert.com/strange-signal-on-mars-reveals-new-clues-to-the-red-planets-hidden-past