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 use data collected on a mission much closer to home in a southern lake. western Turkey.
NASA says the minerals and rock deposits at Salda are the closest matches on earth to those around Jezero Crater, where the spacecraft landed and is believed to have once been flooded with water.
The information gathered from Lake Salda may help scientists look for fossilized traces of microbial life preserved in sediments that are believed to have been deposited around the delta and the long-lost lake that it once fed.
“Salda … will serve as a powerful analogue in which we can learn and interrogate,” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science, told Reuters.
A team of American and Turkish planetary scientists conducted research in 2019 on the shores of the lake, known as the Maldives in Turkey because of its azure water and white shores.
Scientists believe that the sediments around the lake have eroded from large mounds that form with the help of microbes and are known as microbialites.
The team behind the Perseverance rover, the most advanced astrobiology lab that has ever flown to another world, wants to know if there are microbialites in Jezero Crater.
They will also compare the sediments on the Salda beach with carbonate minerals – made up of carbon dioxide and water, a key ingredient for life – detected at the edge of the Jezero crater.
“When we find something in Perseverance, we can go back to look at Lake Salda to really look at both processes, (examining) similarities, but equally important differences, which are really between Perseverance and Lake Salda,” Zurbuchen said.
“So we’re glad we have that lake, just because I think it’ll be with us a long time.”
The samples of rock drilled from the Martian soil are to be deposited on the surface for eventual recovery and delivery on Earth through two future robotic missions, since 2031.
Reporting by Yesim Dikmen; Editing by Dominic Evans and Alison Williams