NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover captured this mosaic at a location nicknamed “Skrinkle Haven” using its Mastcam-Z camera between Feb. 28 and March 9, 2023, between the 721st and 729th Martian days, or sols, of the mission.

The mosaic is made up of 203 individual images that were stitched together after being sent back from Mars. This natural color view is approximately how the scene would appear to an average person if they were on Mars.

“Skrinkle Haven” offers the clearest example of these curved rock layers – called “the curvilinear unit” – that had previously only been seen from space. Scientists are now debating what kind of powerfully flowing water formed those curves: a river like the Mississippi, which winds snakelike across the landscape, or a braided river like Nebraska’s Platte, which forms small islands of sediment called sandbars.

When viewed from the ground, the curved layers are arranged in rows, and appear to ripple out across the landscape. They could be the remnants of a river’s banks that shifted over time – or the remnants of sandbars that formed in the river. The layers were likely much taller in the past; scientists suspect that after these piles of sediment turned to rock, they were sand-blasted by wind over the course of eons and carved down to their present size.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS.

свернуть