What Lies Beneath Mars – NASA’s Perseverance Offers First Underground Radar Images

Since the Mars Perseverance Rover landed on Mars, it has been a fascinating year and a half. Now, fresh data is coming in, and it contains a few surprises.

The rover, roughly the size of a car and equipped with seven scientific instruments, has been unstoppably exploring the 30-mile-wide Jezero crater on our planetary neighbor. Read out below to find some intriguing details.

Mars Underground

The ground-penetrating radar equipment on board the Perseverance discovered surprisingly slanted rock strata beneath the crater’s bottom, according to a research team led by UCLA and the University of Oslo. But that’s not all.

The most intriguing part is that the inclined portions’ slopes, forms, and thicknesses imply that either slowly cooling lava generated them or that sediments from the ancient lake were deposited there. Such a discovery is definitely key in solving some long-time Mars mysteries!

How was such discovery possible?

To understand everything better, you should know some things first. For example, on the western border of the crater, where a river formerly fed the lake and left behind a massive deposit of boulders and soil it picked up along the way, Perseverance is now investigating a delta.

Researchers hope to unravel the dark past of that region of Mars. But that will be possible only by collecting more data from the rover.

David Paige is one of the lead researchers on the Radar Imager for Mars Subsurface Experiment (RIMFAX). He released a statement:

The fact that they are tilted like this requires a more complex geologic history. They could have been formed when molten rock rose up towards the surface, or, alternatively, they could represent an older delta deposit buried in the crater floor.

Check out how Perseverance’s RIMFAX technology is depicted in the image below, as it investigates what is beneath Mars’ surface:

The picture shows that there are several stratified rock strata present, including some that are inclined up to 15 degrees. The puzzle is further complicated by particular intriguing, highly reflective rock layers inside those inclined locations that really tilt in numerous directions.

The data provided by RIMFAX will give vital background for the rock samples obtained by Perseverance, which will eventually be returned to Earth.