NASA spacecraft snaps image of ancient, winding rivers on Mars
NASA’s eye in the Martian sky has spotted evidence of dried-up, primordial rivers on Mars.
The space agency’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured a snapshot of another time, billions of years ago, when water flowed on the surface of a temperate Mars. NASA recently posted the image on its “Planetary Photojournal.”
“This image of ridges in Aeolis Planum tells a story of ancient rivers and a Mars very different to that of today,” NASA wrote online.
The meandering forms you see below are the result of water once filling these rivers with gravel, while finer grains surrounded the waterway when the banks overflowed. “The gravely river bottom and the fine-grained surroundings can lead to a strange phenomenon that geologists call inverted channels,” the agency explained. “After the river disappears, the fine-grained surroundings can be easily eroded away leaving the gravely river bed as a high-standing ridge.”
The long-evolving geological result shows where ancient rivers once snaked across Mars.
NASA’s spacecraft snapped this image from nearly 166 miles above high Martian plains. This Martian satellite carries a big camera, aptly called the High Resolution Imaging Experiment, or HIRISE, that captures such detailed photos.
NASA photos reveal serious damage to its Mars helicopter
After taking 72 flights into the Martian sky, NASA’s Mars helicopter won’t fly again. The craft’s own images show why.
Ingenuity — the first craft to ever make a powered, controlled flight on another planet — recently suffered significant damage to some of its four-foot-long rotors, which are essential for lifting the helicopter into the air. The pictures below, taken by a navigation camera affixed to Ingenuity’s toaster-sized fuselage, show several broken tips. The sun cast the broken rotors’ shadows onto the desert surface.
These rotors can’t fly damaged. Compared to Earth, the Martian atmosphere is quite thin. Its density is about one percent of Earth’s, making it difficult to generate the lift needed for flight. To take to the air, Ingenuity spun its rotor blades at a blazing 2,400 revolutions every minute. It flew distances as far as 2,315 feet.
But as you can see, controlled flight isn’t possible anymore.
The NASA craft didn’t simply prove that flight on Mars was possible. It showed the future of planetary exploration. The extraterrestrial chopper served as a “scout” for the space agency’s Perseverance rover, as the two Martian robots sleuthed for places that might have preserved signs of past primitive life on the dry desert surface. This could mean telltale pieces of genetic material, or parts of a degraded cell.
No evidence of life has been found — but the robots did identify places where primitive life could have once thrived, like in moist sediments along lakeshores and Martian rivers.
NASA’s car-sized rover spots strong evidence of gushing water on Mars
Ancient Mars wasn’t simply just wet. It experienced momentous floods.
As clear evidence of this water-filled past, NASA recently released an image snapped by its Perseverance rover, showing large heavy boulders absolutely blanketing part of the Jezero Crater, a dried-up river delta.
“The rounded boulders seen here are believed to have been washed into Jezero Crater, which Perseverance is exploring, by strong flood waters billions of years ago,” NASA said in a statement. “This occurred during one of three major periods that scientists have identified in the development of the lake and river system that occupied Jezero in the ancient past.”
Some 3.5 billion years ago, bounties of water coursed through a flat Martian plain called Isidis Planitia before breaching the crater’s walls. At times, water flowed deeply and vigorously enough to transport all these boulders, which you can see below.
The Perseverance rover’s older sibling, Curiosity, has also spotted telltale evidence of momentous water-related events on Mars, some 2,300 miles (3,700 kilometers) away from Jezero Crater. Long ago, colossal debris flows on Mars’ Mount Sharp hurled mud and car-sized boulders down the mountain, leaving a prominent ridge today.
One of Perseverance’s primary missions is to look for potential signs of past life on Mars — though there’s still no evidence any existed. But if microbes ever evolved on the Red Planet, the rover is certainly looking in an ideal spot. Jezero once hosted streams, rivers, and a sprawling 22-mile-wide (35 kilometer) lake. Life could have possibly thrived in this region’s wet soils, similar to how life does on Earth.
The car-sized robot is also collecting pristine samples of the Martian surface. NASA wants to closely scrutinize these rocks and soils, and whatever they might contain, up close. “Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis,” the space agency said.
