Pathfinder and landing map
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A landing site of the "Pathfinder" that the United States sent to Mars 22 years ago is the floodplain of ancient seas,
The Pathfinder project began with the transmission of a Mars Orbiter 'Mariner 9' launched in the 1970s, with traces of water tracks appearing to be formed by gigantic floods about 3.4 billion years ago.
NASA, on July 4, 1997, landed the Pathfinder 20 years after the Vikings landing on Independence Day and conducted a geological survey of the surface of Mars on Mars' first rover 'Sovereign.'
At that time, the sojourner searched for traces of ancient floods, but the flooding level was ten times lower than scientists anticipated, resulting in an inconceivable condition that could not completely rule out the formation of lava flows.
Twenty years later, a team led by Dr. Alexis Rodriguez, chief scientist at the US Institute of Planetary Science (PSI), reviewed the data collected at that time and found a new study confirming that the traces of the problem were formed by flooding the water. It was featured in the journal Nature's online sister site, Scientific Reports.
The researchers found that a giant inundation 250 km upstream from the Pathfinder landing site made the Inland Sea unprecedented and the place where the Pathfinder landed was a floodplain separating the Northern plains ocean and the Inland Sea .
The team's computer simulations show that the ancient sea of Mars has disappeared rapidly in just a few thousand years as it was covered with ice and evaporated, but it remained liquid below the ice layer.
The researchers claimed that the ancient sea of Mars had groundwater, unlike Earth, and that if there were creatures in the aquifers that hold groundwater there would be traces of marine sediments where Pathfinder landed.
(Photo = provided by NASA)