Mars rover creates interplanetary ripples of excitement

NASA’s Curiosity rover has found wave-rippled rocks – evidence of an ancient lake – in an area of the planet expected to be drier, the space agency has revealed.

A display of Gediz Vallis, which has boulders and debris believed to have been swept there by wet landslides billions of years ago. Picture: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS / AFP

NASA’s Curiosity rover has found wave-rippled rocks – evidence of an ancient lake – in an area of the planet expected to be drier, the space agency has revealed.

“This is the best evidence of water and waves that we’ve seen in the entire mission,” said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California on Thursday (AEDT).

The rover, which has been ­exploring Mars since 2012, beamed back stunning pictures of rippled patterns on the surface of rocks caused by the waves of a shallow lake billions of years ago.

Curiosity had previously found evidence that lakes once covered parts of Mars in the salty minerals left behind when they dried up.

But NASA scientists were surprised to find such stark evidence of water in the Gale Crater that the rover is now exploring.

“We’ve climbed through many lake deposits during our mission but have never seen wave ripples this clearly,” Dr Vasavada said.

“This was especially surprising because the area we’re in probably formed at a time when Mars was becoming more dry.”

Curiosity is exploring the foothills of a 5000m-high mountain known as Mount Sharp. NASA said the rover had also spotted ­debris in a valley that was washed down by wet landslides on Mount Sharp.

“This landslide debris is probably the most recent evidence of water that we’ll ever see,” Dr ­Vasavada said.

Rippled rocks indicate a lake existed there. Picture: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS / AFP

“It will allow us to study layers higher up on Mount Sharp that we can’t reach.”

NASA said Mount Sharp ­provided a sort of “Martian ­timeline” to scientists, with the oldest layers at the bottom and youngest at the top.

This allowed them to “study how Mars evolved from a planet that was more Earth-like in its ancient past, with a warmer climate and plentiful water, to the freezing desert it is today”, it said.

Another Mars rover, Perseverance, landed on the red planet in February 2021 to look for signs of past microbial life.

The multi-tasking rover will collect 30 rock and soil samples in sealed tubes to be sent back to Earth sometime in the 2030s for lab analysis.

AFP