NASA  finds evidence of an ancient lake that may have bred microbial lifeforms 3 billion years ago

• NASA has confirmed that the Jezero Crater was once filled with water
• Scientists have long speculated the idea, but new has been found that proves it
• READ MORE:  NASA’s historic Ingenuity ends its three-year mission

NASA’s hunt for life on Mars is far from over – its rover has found evidence of an ancient lake that may have been home to microbial life.

The Perseverance rover has been exploring the Jezero Crater where it identified sediments deposited by water, confirming speculations that the formation was flowing with water three billion years ago.

The car-sized, six-wheeled machine captured images of the crater, allowing scientists to see a cross-sectional view of rock layers 65 feet that was ‘almost like looking at a road cut.’

The findings reinforced what previous studies have long suggested – that cold, arid, lifeless Mars was once warm, wet and perhaps habitable.

Scientists chose Jezero Crater for the rover’s mission due to previously finding a display of water-rich minerals in the basin 

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is circling the Red Planet, has also revealed that the crater contains clays, which only form in the presence of water.’

However, the team said the recent evidence from Perseverance proves there was water flowing in the basin. 

The findings were uncovered using Perseverance’s instrument that fires radar waves below the Martian surface at 10-centimeter intervals and measures pulses reflected from depths about 65 feet below the surface.

Scientists were able to see down to the deep base of the sediments, finding two distinct periods of sediment deposition in the middle of two periods of erosion.

The team at the University of California (UC)- Los Angeles and Norway’s University of Olso noticed the crater floor below the delta was not uniformly flat, which could only mean erosion from water had occurred before the deposition of lake sediments.

‘The radar images show that the sediments are regular and horizontal — just like sediments deposited in lakes on Earth. The existence of lake sediments had been suspected in previous studies, but has been confirmed by this research,’ researchers shared in the announcement.

A second period of deposition occurred when fluctuations in the lake level allowed the river to deposit a broad delta that once extended far out into the lake, but has now eroded back closer to the river’s mouth.

First author David Paige, a UCLA professor of Earth, said: ‘The changes we see preserved in the rock record are driven by large-scale changes in the Martian environment.

‘It’s cool that we can see so much evidence of change in such a small geographic area, which allows us to extend our findings to the scale of the entire crater.’

The discovery was made while Perseverance was traveling across the crater floor between May 10 and December 8, 2022.

The rover was heading to an adjacent expanse of braided, sedimentary-like features resembling, from orbit, the river deltas found on Earth.

‘From orbit, we can see a bunch of different deposits, but we can’t tell for sure if what we’re seeing is their original state, or if we’re seeing the conclusion of a long geological story,’ said Page regarding the Mars orbiter that hangs over the Martian world.

‘To tell how these things formed, we need to see below the surface.’

Perseverance launched on July 30, 2020, carrying along its travel companion the Ingenuity helicopter.

Perseverance touched down at the base of Jezero on February 18, 2021, with a mission to find ancient signs of life inside the 820-foot-deep crater.

While the rover is still alive and well, Ingenuity now sits on the dusty landscape after an accident that damaged ‘one or more’ of its blades.

The tiny copter took off on January 18 but lost contact with the commands team and when communication was regained, one of the craft’s blades showed damage.

Ingenuity was originally designed to perform up to five experimental test flights over 30 days when it first landed in 2023.

But the helicopter, which cost $85 million, surpassed expectations with 72 flights and flew more than 14 times farther than planned while logging more than two hours of total flight time.

Data showed the helicopter achieved a maximum altitude of 40 feet and hovered for 4.5 seconds before starting its descent at a velocity of 3.3 feet per second on its last fatal flight.