The Perseverance Marathon made an unexpected discovery at the bottom of the Crater Esero, and the machine encountered volcanic deposits that could have been formed by contacting hot magma with water.
Esero's crater is supposed to be an ancient lake boiler, and the discovery of volcanic rocks was a complete surprise to scientists who assumed that only sedimentary rocks formed from the mud and sediments of the ancient water body were present billions of years ago.
This discovery can be the key to solving the climate history of Mars and determining the exact time frame when the planet was water and potentially inhabited. According to the professor, the origin of the magmatic species of Ezero remains a mystery because there are no apparent volcanic entities here and in the surrounding area.
– reported to Space.com a professor of geochemistry at the California Institute of Technology, Ken Farley, a project participant and lead author of a published article on the subject.
A more precise definition of the age of the species would be possible in the laboratory environment, when the samples collected by the janitor would be delivered to Earth as part of the NASA mission and the European Space Agency, which was scheduled to begin in 2028.