“RIMFAX is giving us a view of Mars stratigraphy similar to what you can see on Earth in highway road cuts, where tall stacks of rock layers are sometimes visible in a mountainside as you drive by,” Paige explained. Compounding the mystery, within those inclined areas are some perplexing highly reflective rock layers that in fact tilt in multiple directions. The image reveals the presence of ubiquitous layered rock strata, including those that are inclined at up to 15 degrees. The shapes, densities, thicknesses, angles and compositions of underground objects affect how the radar waves bounce back, creating a visual image of what lies beneath.ĭuring Perseverance’s initial 3-kilometer traverse, the instrument has obtained a continuous radar image that reveals the electromagnetic properties and bedrock stratigraphy - the arrangement of rock layers - of Jezero’s floor to depths of 15 meters, or about 49 feet. RIMFAX obtains a picture of underground features by sending bursts of radar waves below the surface, which are reflected by rock layers and other obstacles. Paige said that most of the evidence gathered by the rover so far points to an igneous, or molten, origin, but based on the RIMFAX data, he and the team can’t yet say for certain how the inclined layers formed. They could have been formed when molten rock rose up towards the surface, or, alternatively, they could represent an older delta deposit buried in the crater floor.” The fact that they are tilted like this requires a more complex geologic history. “We were expecting to see horizontal rocks on the crater floor. “We were quite surprised to find rocks stacked up at an inclined angle,” said David Paige, a UCLA professor of Earth, planetary and space sciences and one of the lead researchers on the Radar Imager for Mars Subsurface Experiment, or RIMFAX. As the rover gathers more data, the researchers hope to clear up the complex history of this part of the Red Planet.ĭavid Paige, deputy principal investigator for Perseverance’s RIMFAX instrument. Perseverance is currently exploring a delta on the western edge of the crater, where a river once fed the lake, leaving behind a large deposit of dirt and rocks it picked up along its course. The slopes, thicknesses and shapes of the inclined sections suggest they were either formed by slowly cooling lava or deposited as sediments in the former lake. In a paper published today in the journal Science Advances, a research team led by UCLA and the University of Oslo reveals that rock layers beneath the crater’s floor, observed by the rover’s ground-penetrating radar instrument, are unexpectedly inclined. The rover, which is about the size of car and carries seven scientific instruments, has been probing Mars’ 30-mile-wide Jezero crater, once the site of a lake and an ideal spot to search for evidence of ancient life and information about the planet’s geological and climatic past. Probing the past. The variations could indicate past lava flows or possibly a river delta even older than the one currently being explored on the crater floor.Īfter a tantalizing year-and-a-half wait since NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover touched down on our nearest planetary neighbor, new data is arriving - and bringing with it a few surprises.What lies beneath. The rover’s subsurface radar experiment, co-led by UCLA’s David Paige, has returned images showing unexpected variations in rock layers beneath the Jezero crater.Roving the Red Planet. Perseverance landed on Mars in February 2021 and has been gathering data on the planet's geology and climate and searching for signs of ancient life..They said there are linear fractures along this outcrop, and this is a place where several linear fractures happen to intersect," the website indicates from statements by NASA's JPL spokesperson. "The team scientists stressed how small the crack is: about 30 centimeters across and 45 centimeters wide. "The agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) said it was actually a " very, very, very, very magnified shot of a small crack in a rock" stated the Snopes website statement. The site's specialists contacted NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for more information. The website Snope, which is in charge of verifying several facts that become viral or popular in the networks to determine if they are real or not, made its analysis about the peculiar "door". It is a natural movement called "shear fracture", which caused the rock to accumulate stress from seismic movements and eventually break. The experts assure that earthquakes are very common on the planet, and the last one recorded was on May 4, which could have caused the formation of the "door". NASA scientists attributed the origin of the "extraterrestrial door", as some have called it, to the seismic movements that occur on the planet.
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