The Chinese rover Zhurong yesterday, May 12, made an amazing discovery, finding strong evidence that water has persisted on Mars for a much longer period than previously expected by scientists from around the world, CNN reported citing its sources. It is important to note that the Chinese Zhurong landed on the Utopia plain (the northern hemisphere of Mars) – exactly in the same place where the American NASA Wiking-2 lander landed in 1976. Then the Americans could not find anything of the kind, but modern technology, apparently, gave the Chinese researchers a certain advantage.
Zhurong was originally sent to Mars on a primary mission to look for signs of life, which lasted only three months. During this event, the rover explored various minerals, the planet’s environment, and the distribution of layers of ice and water on the Utopia Plain. After the completion of the main mission, the rover continued to collect information and send it to the Tianwen-1 orbital module. It is thanks to these data that scientists were able to take a different look at the water cover of Mars – the information sent by the rover suggests that there was water in the Utopia pool at a time when the planet was considered to be completely dry.
“The most important development is that we were able to detect hydrogenated materials at the landing site. These materials are the result of interaction with surface water,” said Liu Yang, a member of the National Space Research Laboratory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Chinese scientists plan to further study the soil at the rover’s landing site to learn more about the region’s aquatic history.
Source: Trash Box
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