The Perseverance rover has just landed on Mars. Meanwhile, its precursor Curiosity continues to explore the base of Mount Sharp (officially Aeolis Mons), a mountain several kilometres high at the centre of the Gale crater. Using the telescope on the ChemCam instrument to make detailed observations of the steep terrain of Mount Sharp at a distance, a French-US team headed by William Rapin, CNRS researcher at the
Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie (CNRS/Université Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier/CNES)1, has discovered that the Martian climate recorded there alternated between dry and wetter periods, before drying up completely about 3 billion years ago. Spacecraft in orbit around Mars had already provided clues about the mineral composition of the slopes of Mount Sharp. But now, ChemCam has successfully made detailed observations of the sedimentary beds from the planet’s surface, revealing the conditions under which they formed. Moving up through the terrain ob
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Using this telescope allowed the team of US and French scientists to reveal the conditions under which these sedimentary beds first formed.
Moving up through the terrain, which is several hundred feet thick, the types of bed change radically, the team explained.
Lying above the lake-deposited clays that form the base of Mount Sharp, wide, tall, cross-bedded structures are a sign of the migration of wind-formed dunes.
These dunes would have formed during a long, dry climate episode, thought to have been common and interspersing shorter, wet periods.
Mars shifted between long dry periods and wetter eras before completely drying up to the nearly dead world we see today about three billion years ago, study shows
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IMAGE: View of Mount Sharp, Mars, with buttes showing main stratigraphy of the sulfate-bearing unit to be explored by the Curiosity rover, and expected ancient environments based on observed sedimentary structures.. view more
Credit: Rapin et al., Geology
Boulder, Colo., USA: Gale Crater s central sedimentary mound (Aeolis Mons or, informally, Mount Sharp) is a 5.5-km-tall remnant of the infilling and erosion of this ancient impact crater. Given its thickness and age, Mount Sharp preserves one of the best records of early Martian climatic, hydrological, and sedimentary history.
In this paper, published today in
Geology, William Rapin and colleagues present the first description of key facies in the sulfate-bearing unit, recently observed in the distance by the rover, and propose a model for changes in depositional environments.