Lake Salda, Turkey:
As NASA’s rover Perseverance explores the surface of Mars, scientists hunting for indicators of ancient life on the distant planet are making use of information gathered on a mission considerably closer to residence at a lake in southwest Turkey.
NASA says the minerals and rock deposits at Salda are the nearest match on earth to these about the Jezero Crater exactly where the spacecraft landed and which is believed to have after been flooded with water.
Information gathered from Lake Salda may well aid the scientists as they search for fossilised traces of microbial life preserved in sediment believed to have been deposited about the delta and the lengthy-vanished lake it after fed.
“Salda … will serve as a powerful analogue in which we can learn and interrogate,” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, told Reuters.
A group of American and Turkish planetary scientists carried out study in 2019 on the shorelines of the lake, identified as Turkey’s Maldives for the reason that of its azure water and white shores.
Scientists think that the sediments about the lake eroded from substantial mounds that are formed with the aid of microbes and are identified as microbialites.
The group behind the Perseverance rover, the most sophisticated astrobiology lab ever flown to a further globe, desires to locate out regardless of whether there are microbialites in Jezero Crater.
They will also evaluate the beach sediments from Salda with carbonate minerals – formed from carbon dioxide and water, a important ingredient for life – detected on the margins of Jezero Crater.
“When we find something at Perseverance we can go back to look at Lake Salda to really look at both processes, (looking at) similarities but equally importantly differences that are really between Perseverance and Lake Salda,” Zurbuchen stated.
“So we are really glad we 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 eventual retrieval and delivery to Earth by two future robotic missions, as early as 2031.
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