LAKE SALDA, Turkey (Reuters) – As NASA’s Perseverance rover explores the surface of Mars, scientists looking for signs of ancient life on the distant planet are using data collected during a mission much closer to home to a lake in the southwest from Turkey.
NASA says the mineral and rock deposits at Salda are the closest match on Earth to those around the Jezero crater where the spacecraft landed and is believed to have ever been flooded with water.
Information gleaned from Lake Salda can help scientists search for fossilized traces of microbial life preserved in sediment believed to have deposited around the delta and the long-lost lake that once fed it.
“Salda … will serve as a powerful analog in which to learn and question,” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s science administrator, told Reuters.
In 2019, a team of American and Turkish planetary scientists conducted research on the shores of the lake, known as the Maldives of Turkey for its azure waters and white shores.
Scientists believe that the sediments around the lake eroded from large mounds formed with the help of microbes known as microbialites.
The team behind the Perseverance rover, the most advanced astrobiology lab ever flown to another world, wants to know if there are microbialites in Jezero Crater.
They will also compare Salda’s beach sediments to carbonate minerals – formed from carbon dioxide and water, an important ingredient for life – detected at the edges of the Jezero crater.
“If we find something in Perseverance, we can go back to look at Lake Salda to really look at both processes, (looking at) similarities, but equally important, differences that are really between Perseverance and Lake Salda,” said Zurbuchen.
“So we are very happy to have that more, just because I think it will be with us for a long time”.
Rock samples drilled from Mars soil will be stored on the surface for eventual reclamation and delivery to Earth by two future robotic missions, as early as 2031.
Reporting by Yesim Dikmen; Adaptation by Dominic Evans and Alison Williams