The Perseverance Mission Support Team has published a new series of images taken in the region known informally as Hogwallow Flats and “bacon strip” (because of how it looks on satellite images).
It is possible that soon this region will have another name — a paradise for geologists. According to the researchers, the Perseverance rocks captured in the pictures are of great scientific interest. They consist of sedimentary deposits left over from the time when the ancient river delta was located here. Their analysis will be able to answer the question of what the climate of Mars was like four billion years ago. And if, as planned, the samples collected by Perseverance will be delivered to our planet in the future, in the process of their subsequent study in laboratories, researchers may well find some traces left by living beings who lived on the Red Planet (if there were such, of course).
In addition to the scientific value, Perseverance images also serve as another visual demonstration of how bizarre shapes can create erosion forces. In one of the photos of the rover, you can see two unusual formations at once. One of them is a stone structure protruding from the rock, which very much resembles the head of a snake (or, with due imagination, the head of a sandworm from the movie “Dune”). On the left, you can see another strange formation in the form of a stone block, on top of which another stone “balances” like an acrobat.
Earlier we wrote about how Perseverance found garbage on Mars.
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