The US Mars rover Perseverance has found evidence that the Jezero crater on Mars, where it was meant to land, may once have been water.
The US space agency (NASA) has suspected for some time that the red planet water may have been present on the surface of Mars for a long time in the past, but until recently no one could say for sure. Now, however, images taken by Perseverance have confirmed earlier speculation that the Jezero crater may have once been a water-filled lake some 3.7 billion years ago.
For evidence are images taken by the Mars rover's main camera unit, Mastcam-Z. Based on the information collected, Perseverance has found sedimentary formations, known as landforms, on the planet's surface, suggesting that the lake was once fed by a delta river. It also revealed that the lake bed had to cope with severe flash floods, which caused huge boulders to drift to the lake bed, some of which can still be found today.
After a risky landing in July last year, the Mars rover landed in February this year in a former lake bed, Jezero Crater, which was designated as the landing site, with the aim of discovering evidence of life on the red planet in addition to the geology and climate history of the body.
