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Paris- The mobile robot “Perseference”, which landed on Mars last February, revealed its first scientific results, stimulating scientists’ interest in searching for traces of past life at its landing site, a crater that contained a lake three billion years ago.
The Franco-American “SuperCam” camera installed on the mast of the robot of the American space agency (NASA) was able to monitor the environment of the Jezero crater, a location chosen on the basis of satellite data.
The first high-resolution images taken by the camera confirmed the indications given by the satellite data.The 35-kilometer-diameter crater already contained a closed lake that was previously fed by a river crossing the delta, between 3.6 and 3 billion years.
The study, published in the journal Science, and the first since the landing of Perseverance, gives a series of new details about this site, which included a lake the size of Lake Geneva in Geneva, Switzerland.
“Supercam”, a very advanced camera whose parts were installed in France, allowed the monitoring of sedimentary layers which serve as fertile ground to “find traces of previous life”, according to what the National Institute of Scientific Research (CNRS) French explained at a press conference in which he presented the results of this study.The study was supervised by one of its researchers, Nicola Mangold.
These layers, which form a plateau some 40 meters high, have been called Kodiak, which is a metaphor for “fine deposits of clay or sand in which organic matter is easy to store,” according to a geologist. planetary from the Laboratory of Planetary and Geodynamic Sciences. .
However, care must be taken in approaching the results, as this organic matter can also come from “hard carbonaceous materials” such as cometary deposits.
Living organic matter is made up of a mixture of molecules of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and, to a lesser extent, oxygen, explains Sylvester Morris of the Institute for Research in Astrophysics and Planetary Sciences of the United States. ‘Paul Sabatier University of Toulouse.
It is the kind of material “found in underground and delta deposits, hence the importance of the Jezero crater for astrobiology.”
“Every astrobiologist naturally dreams of finding organic matter produced by living organisms on Mars,” said Christian Mustaine, matter expert at the French National Astronomical Center (CNAS).
Among the conclusions that were drawn through the efforts of the “President” is that Jezero was a closed lake, that water came in and out, and water levels had changed there. “Some sites were sometimes in the open and sometimes under water, which constituted ideal living conditions.” But this environment is closed, “and therefore less dynamic and its hydrological activity is shorter than the case of open lakes”, according to the geologist.
Perseverance has also spotted large stones and rocky conglomerates, which indicate the onset of strong water currents and flash floods. It is likely that the extinction of Lake Jezero was accompanied by significant climate change, according to the study.
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