NASA rover snaps photos of ancient 'waves' carved into Mars mountainside
By Stephanie Pappas
published 2 days ago
NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has photographed clear signs of ripples locked into a Martian rock, a sign of an ancient lake on the Red Planet's surface.
The bumpy texture of these rocks is the clearest evidence yet from Mount Sharp of an ancient Martian lake. Billions of years ago, wind playing across the surface of a shallow lake disturbed the lake-bottom sediments, which eventually became these rocks. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has photographed rocks imprinted with tiny ripples from an ancient lake. And these tiny ripples are making waves on Earth, as they are the clearest evidence yet that water once existed on the Red Planet.
The ripple marks were discovered frozen in Martian rock on the slopes of Mount Sharp. Though Curiosity has traversed many rock deposits laid down in ancient lakes, scientists had not seen such vivid marks in the rocks before.
"This is the best evidence of water and waves that we've seen in the entire mission," Ashwin Vasavada(opens in new tab), Curiosity’s project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a statement(opens in new tab). "We climbed through thousands of feet of lake deposits and never saw evidence like this – and now we found it in a place we expected to be dry."
Since last fall, the rover has been exploring a region of what scientists call "sulfate-bearing" rock. Scientists believe this salt-rich area was deposited when an ancient lake was nearly dry. But the ripples were created on the bottom of a shallow lake as winds created waves on the lake’s surface, disturbing the sediments below.
More:
https://www.livescience.com/nasa-rover-snaps-photos-of-ancient-waves-carved-into-mars-mountainside
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