Photos from NASA's Perseverance rover indicate ancient flash floods on Mars
CBSN
A new study from the team behind NASA's Perseverance Mars rover reveals that areas of Mars — specifically the Jezero Crater, an area scientists think may hold keys to ancient Martian life — experienced "significant" flash floods that carved the landscape into the rocky wasteland we see today.
The team says they based their findings on images the rover took of sediment that gathered at the end of an ancient river that fed a lake inside the Jezero Crater.
The photos, taken during a landing on February 18 and published on Thursday, suggest that billions of years ago, Mars had a thick atmosphere that could support large quantities of water. The sediment seen in the pictures shows a now-barren river delta that experienced "late-stage flooding events" whose waters carried boulders and debris from Mars highlands to the banks of the crater.
