Tag

Water Activity

All articles tagged with #water activity

space-exploration1 year ago

"Mars Rover Discovers Enigmatic Subsurface Polygons"

China's Zhurong rover has discovered mysterious polygons beneath Mars' surface, similar to those spotted by NASA in 2012, suggesting a long, wet period in the planet's ancient past. These features, found 35 kilometers below the surface, could indicate the presence of water and increase the likelihood of past life on Mars. The polygons, potentially formed between 3.7 and 2.9 billion years ago, may have resulted from water-related processes, such as freeze-thaw cycles. While the rover has been decommissioned, researchers believe the Utopia Planitia region remains a prime location to investigate ancient water activity on Mars.

space2 years ago

China's Mars Rover Uncovers Evidence of Liquid Water on Red Planet's Surface

China's Zhurong rover has found evidence of recent water activity on Mars, with cracked layers on tiny Martian dunes suggesting the Red Planet was a salt-rich watery world as recently as 400,000 years ago. The rover explored four nearby crescent-shaped dunes in the Utopia Planitia region, which are coated with thin, ubiquitously fractured crusts and ridges that formed thanks to melting small pockets of "modern water" sometime between 1.4 million years to 400,000 years ago. The latest findings from analyzing images and data sent home by Zhurong and its Tianwen 1 orbiter companion show that appreciable amounts of water from the planet's icy polar regions wafted to lower latitudes a few million years ago, settling atop the Utopia Planitia dunes.