NASA’s Perseverance rover has found that Mars’ Jezero crater was at one point filled with water, offering a tantalizing hope that it may have already unearthed fossilized life on the planet.
The rover, which first touched down on the crater in February 2021 along with its now-retired helicopter companion Ingenuity, made the discovery using ground-penetrating radar — revealing layers of sediment once belonging to a lake that later dried into a gigantic delta.
The finding raises hopes that, once geological samples Perseverance has collected from the crater return to Earth, researchers may find evidence that ancient life once thrived on the now desiccated Red Planet. The researchers published their findings Jan. 26 in the journal Science Advances.
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