Chinese rover discovers probable traces of ancient oceans on Mars

The Chinese Martian rover Zhu Rong landed on Utopia Planitia , a large basin in the northern plains, in 2021. It is currently in hibernation during the harsh Martian winter and dust storms. Scientists used ground-penetrating radar on China's Mars rover to find possible evidence of flood events on the red planet that were deposited billions of years ago.
While no direct evidence of liquid water was found in the shallow subsurface, the study lends weight to the theory that the rover's landing area hosted an ancient ocean, the team said in a Nature article published online Monday.
Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Peking University also stated that the existence of water even today at great depth cannot be ruled out.

The Zhu Rong rover landed on Utopia Planitia – a large basin in the northern plains of Mars – in 2021 as part of the Chinese Tianwen-1 Mars mission. It has since traveled over 1.9 km (1.2 miles) to perform ground surveys, four decades after NASA's Viking 2 landed in the region.
Geologist Chen Ling and her colleagues used the Rover Penetrating Radar (RoPeR) on Zhu Rong to measure the density of the rocks, finding a multilayer structure in the upper 100 meters of the basin's surface.
The radar image showed four horizontal layers formed at different times and through different geological processes. The thickest layer, about 30-80 meters from the surface, is made up of larger rocks, probably sediment deposits from a rapid catastrophic flood that occurred about 3 billion years ago.
The overlying layer contains smaller, younger rocks that are likely the result of weathering, asteroid impacts, or regional flooding, according to the researchers.
The surface layer, less than 10 meters thick, is made up of loose rocks and dust, while the lower layer did not give enough radar reflections to show a coherent structure.
Chen said RoPeR works in two frequency ranges. At higher frequencies, it can penetrate 10 meters below the surface with a resolution of a few centimeters. At lower frequencies, it can reach a depth of 100 meters with a resolution of a few meters.
"It is spectacular that RoPeR is able to look so deep with good resolution," said Svein-Erik Hamran of the University of Oslo, principal investigator of the RIMFAX ground penetration radar aboard NASA's Perseverance rover.
The scientists used ground penetration radar data on Zhu Rong to construct an image of the surface of southern Utopia Planitia. The image shows the multilayer structure of the soil in the Utopia basin. Image: Pantry
Scientists used ground penetration radar data on Zhu Rong to construct an image of the southern surface of Utopia Planitia. The image shows the multilayer structure of the soil in the Utopia basin. Image: Pantry
Zhu Rong and Perseverance are the only two rovers equipped with an underground radar to work on Mars.
Their findings so far have been very different. In the tallest 15 meters below Jezero Crater – where Perseverance landed to look for sediments from an ancient lake – there were multiple inclined layers made of denser rocks, as Hamran and his team reported in Science Advances last month. However, the Perseverance radar was unable to examine the individual layers and determine their consistency.

The presence of oceans on Mars would be consistent with the theory that a Mars similar to Earth, with a dense atmosphere and oceans of liquid water. At the time, Mars also had a magnetic field that protected the planet from the solar wind. However, the Martian magnetic field would run out, and at that point the atmosphere and surface water would be blown away by the solar wind.

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The article The Chinese rover discovers probable traces of ancient oceans on Mars comes from ScenariEconomici.it .

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This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/il-rover-cinese-scopre-probabili-tracce-di-antichi-oceani-su-marte/ on Mon, 26 Sep 2022 21:12:50 +0000.