NASA Mars Perseverance Rover Finds Water Meeting Magma in Near Jezero Crater

NASA Mars Perseverance rover, poised to visit Enchanted Lake in Jazero crater, has discovered a significant discovery concerning water and a volcanically active Mars. The rover detected volcanic rocks that have reacted with water on the Jezero Crater bottom.

Jezero crater was chosen because it originally held a lake billions of years ago. The rover is searching for ancient microbes. The paper summarizes three in-depth publications published in Science and Science Advances.

While they thought to discover sedimentary rock, which originates from sand and mud in water, they found two types of igneous rock: one created underground from magma, the other from surface volcanic activity.

The report describes the crater floor before the rover arrived, rocks that originated from a thick body of magma, and how Perseverance's rock-vaporizing laser and ground-penetrating radar confirmed that igneous rocks blanket the crater floor.

NASA Mars Perseverance Rover Finds Magma and Water on Jezero Crater

Geochemist David Shuster, a professor of earth and planetary science at the University of California, Berkeley, and a lead author of the study, said that examining the chronology of Mars's rocks could also aid researchers in determining when a lake existed at the location and when the environment could have supported life.

The boulders were gathered from four locations on the crater floor, including two locations known as Sétah (Navajo meaning "amidst the sand") and two areas known as Máaz (Mars in the Navajo language).

All of the samples were igneous cumulate rocks, which are perfect for accurate geochronology once they are brought down to Earth.

NASA Perseverance Rover Lands On Mars — UNSPECIFIED: In this concept illustration provided by NASA, NASA's Perseverance (Mars 2020) rover will store rock and soil samples in sealed tubes on the planet's surface for future missions to retrieve in the area known as Jezero crater on the planet Mars. A key objective for Perseverance's mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet's geology and past climate, paving the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith. NASA via Getty Images

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Igneous cumulate rocks are generated when molten lava cools. Additionally, the rocks exhibit evidence of water-related changes.

Shuster said that the age of the rocks that were retrieved from the crater's bottom may give a range for how long the delta may have formed.

"When that delta was deposited is one of the main objectives of our sample return program, because that will quantify when the lake was present and when the environmental conditions were present that could possibly have been amenable to life," said Shuster in a statement (via Science Daily).

In the last 2.5-3.5 billion years, whatever was covering the rocks at the Sétah sites appears to have developed underground and cooled gradually. A magma lake that progressively cooled and filled the crater may have also generated the rocks.

What Makes Discovery Special

Despite having a different composition than samples found at the other sites, the Máaz sites are nonetheless igneous. The fact that the rocks are from a layer above the rock layer at the Sétah sites suggests that they may have originated from a magma lake's top layer. They could potentially be the result of a subsequent volcanic eruption.

The samples, according to Dr. David Flannery from the QUT Faculty of Science and QUT Planetary Surface Exploration research group, will help scientists better understand warmer and wetter times in Mars' history and any signs of previous life.

"It was a surprise that we didn't find sedimentary rocks on the crater floor, but also ideal because finding a datable igneous sample was one of the main mission goals," said Flannery per Jerusalem Post.