This image of Mars’ Jezero Crater is overlaid with mineral data detected from orbit. The green color represents carbonates – minerals that form in watery environments with conditions that might be favorable for preserving signs of ancient life. NASA’s Perseverance is currently exploring the green area above Jezero’s fan (center).
NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/JHU-APL
NASA continues with its breakthrough discoveries and the capturing of breathtaking images with its James Webb Telescope. Just this week NASA revealed that its Perseverance Rover deciphered the ancient history of what is believed to be a Martian lake. Also, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope Webb provided new insights into an exploded star, Cassiopeia A (Cas A).
The Webb Telescope’ Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) view of Cas A displayed the stellar explosion at a resolution NASA said was previously unreachable at these wavelengths, revealing “intricate details of the expanding shell of material slamming into the gas shed by the star before it exploded.”
Cas A, explained NASA, is one of the “most well-studied supernova remnants in all the cosmos.”
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Over the years, ground-based and space-based observatories, including NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory, Hubble Space Telescope, and retired Spitzer Space Telescope have assembled a multiwavelength picture of the object’s remnant.
However, astronomers have now entered a new era in the study of Cas A. In April 2023, Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) started this chapter, unveiling new and unexpected features within the inner shell of the supernova remnant. Many of those features are invisible in the new NIRCam image, and astronomers are investigating why.
As for the Martian “lake,” now at 1,000 days on Mars, the mission NASA said the Perseverance Rover traversed an ancient river and lake system, collecting “valuable” samples along the way.
While there may be no evidence of water on Mars today – or at least none has been detected – the existence of what were clearly one river beds and lakes created by the traveling of water, as on Earth, shows there may have been water on Mars in the distant past.
Marking its 1,000th Martian day on the Red Planet, NASA’s Perseverance rover recently completed its exploration of the ancient river delta that holds evidence of a lake that filled Jezero Crater billions of years ago. To date, the rover collected a total of 23 samples, revealing the geologic history of this region of Mars in the process.
One sample called “Lefroy Bay” contains a large quantity of fine-grained silica, a material known to preserve ancient fossils on Earth. Another, “Otis Peak,” holds a significant amount of phosphate, which is often associated with life as we know it. Both of these samples are also rich in carbonate, which can preserve a record of the environmental conditions from when the rock was formed.
“We picked Jezero Crater as a landing site because orbital imagery showed a delta – clear evidence that a large lake once filled the crater. A lake is a potentially habitable environment, and delta rocks are a great environment for entombing signs of ancient life as fossils in the geologic record,” said Perseverance’s project scientist, Ken Farley of Caltech. “After thorough exploration, we’ve pieced together the crater’s geologic history, charting its lake and river phase from beginning to end.”
Jezero formed from an asteroid impact almost 4 billion years ago. After Perseverance landed in February 2021, the mission team discovered the crater floor is made of igneous rock formed from magma underground or from volcanic activity at the surface. They have since found sandstone and mudstone, signaling the arrival of the first river in the crater hundreds of millions of years later. Above these rocks are salt-rich mudstones, signaling the presence of a shallow lake experiencing evaporation. The team thinks the lake eventually grew as wide as 22 miles (35 kilometers) in diameter and as deep as 100 feet (30 meters).
“We were able to see a broad outline of these chapters in Jezero’s history in orbital images, but it required getting up close with Perseverance to really understand the timeline in detail,” said Libby Ives, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which manages the mission.
