Mars rover finds rippled rocks caused by waves: NASA

Curiosity’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, Ashwin Vasavada, stated, “This is the best evidence of water and waves that we’ve seen in the entire mission.”

Since 2012, the rover has been exploring Mars. It sent back stunning images of rippled patterns on the rocks’ surface caused by waves from a shallow lake billions of years ago.

Curiosity had previously discovered evidence that salty minerals from dried-up lakes once covered a portion of Mars.

However, the rover’s discovery of such clear water evidence in the Gale Crater that it is currently exploring surprised NASA researchers.

Vasavada stated in a statement, “We’ve climbed through many lake deposits during our mission but have never seen wave ripples this clearly.”

He stated, “This was especially surprising because the region we are in probably formed when Mars was becoming more dry.”

Exploring the foothills of Mount Sharp, a mountain five kilometers and three miles high, is a sign of curiosity.

According to NASA, the rover has also detected debris in a valley on Mount Sharp that was washed away by wet landslides.

Vasavada stated, “This landslide debris is probably the most recent evidence of water that we will ever see.” We will be able to study layers that are higher up on Mount Sharp than we currently can.

According to NASA, Mount Sharp serves as a kind of “Martian timeline” for scientists, with the youngest layers at the top and oldest layers at the bottom.

According to the statement, this gives them the opportunity to “study how Mars evolved from a planet that was more Earth-like in its ancient past, with a warmer climate and abundant water, to the freezing desert it is today.”

Perseverance, a second Mars rover, arrived on the Red Planet in February 2021 to search for evidence of earlier microbial life.

30 sealed samples of rock and soil will be collected by the multitasking rover and sent back to Earth for laboratory analysis in the 2030s.