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By Yesim Dikmen
LAKE SALDA, Turkey (Reuters) – As NASA’s Perseverance rover explores the surface of Mars, scientists looking for signs of ancient life on a distant planet use data collected on a mission much closer to home them in a lake in southwestern Turkey.
NASA says the minerals and rock deposits at Salda are the closest on earth to those around the Jezero Crater where the spacecraft landed and which was said to have been inundated once.
Information gathered from Lake Salda can help scientists search for fossilized traces of microbial life preserved in sediment that is believed to have been deposited around the delta and the long-extinct lake it once fed.
“Salda … will serve as a powerful analogue in which we can learn and question,” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, told Reuters.
A team of American and Turkish planetary scientists conducted research in 2019 on the shores of the lake, known as Turkey’s Maldives because of its azure waters and white shores.
Scientists believe that the sediment around the lake eroded from large mounds formed with the help of microbes and known as microbialites.
The team behind the Perseverance rover, the most advanced astrobiology lab ever flown in another world, wants to know if there are microbialites in Jezero crater.
They will also compare Salda beach sediments with carbonate minerals – formed from carbon dioxide and water, a key ingredient for life – detected on the margins of Jezero Crater.
“When we find something at Perseverance, we can go back and look at Lake Salda to really look at the two processes, (looking at) the similarities but just as importantly the differences that really are between Perseverance and Lake Salda,” Zurbuchen said.
“So we’re very happy to have this lake, just because I think it will stay with us for a long time.”
Rock samples drilled from Martian soil must be stored on the surface for possible recovery and delivery to Earth by two future robotic missions, as early as 2031.
(Reporting by Yesim Dikmen; Editing by Dominic Evans and Alison Williams)
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