Good news for scientists investigating if Mars has life… (By Jaiden, 12)

By Jaiden, 12, Jill Dando News Correspondent

It’s good news as scientists has found that the ancient lake Sediment on Mars has evidence of life.

People for hundreds of years have tried to find out if there is life beyond earth with Mars being a huge focus of their attention.

Now Perseverance Rover has found samples of ‘alien’ life. It was discovered on Jezero crater, believed to be filled with water at some point, which left behind lake sediments  at the base

The existence of these lake sediments had long been suspected from satellite images, but ground-penetrating radar is the first to confirm it.

“From orbit we can see a bunch of different deposits, but we can’t tell for sure if what we’re seeing is their original state, or if we’re seeing the conclusion of a long geological story,”  Professor David Paige from University of California-Los Angeles confirmed. “To tell how these things formed, we need to see below the surface.”

The Perseverance rover, it is about the size of a car, has been exploring the 30-mile-wide crater since 2021.

In 2022, the rover drove up from the crater floor onto the delta, a vast expanse of 3-billion-year-old sediments that, from orbit, resembles the river deltas on Earth.

As the rover drove onto the delta, its Radar Imager for Mars’ Subsurface Experiment instrument (RIMFAX) fired radar waves downward at 10-centimetre intervals and measured pulses reflected from depths of about 65-feet below the surface (20 metres). With the radar, scientists can see down to the base of the sediments to reveal the top surface of the buried crater floor.

Jaiden of Jill Dando News is one of over 100 Jill Dando Journalists who find, write and publish positive good news out across the world in memory of Jill. 

Jill Dando is also a former student of WCSA where the project began.

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