The ancient Mars river delta that Perseverance is exploring is living up to the hype.
that we have yet found on the mission," Perseverance project scientist Ken Farley, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said during a press conference Thursday .
One delta feature that Perseverance recently sampled and studied, a 3-foot-wide rock the team calls Wildcat Ridge, is particularly intriguing. Wildcat is a fine-grained mudstone that likely formed at the bottom of Jezero's ancient lake, team members said. Perseverance's SHERLOC instrument found that the rock is packed with organics, which are spatially associated with sulfur-containing minerals called sulfates.
"On Earth, sulfate deposits are known to conserve organics and can harbor signs of life, which are called Farley and Sharma stressed, however, that these Martian compounds cannot be considered biosignatures. Organics can be generated and emplaced by purely geological processes, and the data gathered by Perseverance so far don't tell us enough about the origin scenario to make a call.
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