As NASA’s Perserverance rover explores the surface of Mars, scientists hunting for signs of ancient life on a distant planet are using data collected on a mission much closer to home at a lake. in southwestern Turkey.
NASA says Salda’s minerals and rock deposits are the closest match on Earth to those around the Jezero Crater where the spacecraft landed and is believed to have once been flooded by water.
Information gathered from Lake Salda may help scientists find fossil traces of microbial life preserved in sediment thought to have been deposited around the delta and lake. long gone.
“Salda … will be a powerful analogue in which we can learn and study,” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA ‘s associate administrator for science, told Reuters.
A team of American and Turkish planetary scientists surveyed the shores of the lake in 2019, known as the Maldives of Turkey because of its azure water and white shores.
Scientists believe that the sediments around the lake have eroded from large mounds formed with the help of microbes and are called microbialites.
The team is behind the rover Perseverance, the most advanced astrobiology lab ever to cross over to another world, to find out if there are microbialites in Jezero Crater.
They also compare Salda beach sediments with carbonate minerals – formed from carbon dioxide and water, a key ingredient for life – found on the edges of Jezero Crater.
“When we find something at Perseverance we can go back and look at Lake Salda to take a closer look at the two processes, (look at) similarities but equally important differences. really between Sustainability and Lake Salda, “Zurbuchen said.
“So we are very happy to have that lake, just because I think it will be with us for a long time”.
Samples of rock drilled from Martian soil are to be stored on the surface for retrieval and delivery to Earth by two future robotic missions, as early as 2031.
© Thomson Reuters 2021
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