China's Zhurong Mars rover found recent water activity on the planet.
The Chinese Mars rover, previously thought to be gone, recently found evidence of recent water activity on the Red Planet - as recent as less than 500,000 years ago.
The rover was previously in a long state of hibernation before its delayed wake-up due to entering such a state during the Martian Winter and in May 2022.
Zhurong Mars Rover Discovery Details
Zhurong, according to a paper published on Science.org, recently found evidence of recent water activity for the first time in its stay on Mars - cracked layers on tiny Martian dunes.
According to the paper, the four miniature dunes, which appear crescent-shaped and are shy of 50-100 ft. long and about three feet tall, are coated with thin, ubiquitously fractured crusts and ridges, which formed from the melting of small pockets of "modern water" sometime between 1.4 million years to 400,000 years ago.
The paper mentioned that the Zhurong rover rolled closer to and found the miniature dunes within the Utopia Planitia region, which is a place Chinese astronomers like Zongcheng Ling and their team thought to be the "origination area" of dust storms and the main route of the Artic dust storm sequences in their study. Interestingly, the Utopia Planitia region was where Zhurong spent the last few months in hibernation; it was also near the rover's landing site.
Images of the dunes, which Zhurong sent to its Tianwen 1 orbiter companion, show that water from the planet's icy polar regions drifted to lower latitudes a few million years ago, which then settled atop the dunes within the Utopia Planitia region.
Zhurong's laser-induced breakdown spectrometer then revealed that the chemical makeup of the sand grains that created the mini dunes had hydrated minerals like sulfates, silica, iron oxide, and chlorides. These minerals would have only formed in the presence of water within the Utopia Planitia region in the late Amazonian era on Mars, which scientists previously thought was bone-dry.
The discovery of this evidence implies that Mars harbored salt water on its surface as recently as 400,000 years ago - when Earth and early humans experienced extreme environmental changes, per the Smithsonian Magazine.
It also means that there was a time when Earth and Mars appear blue at a distance in space due to the bodies of water it had.
According to Xiaoguang Qin, a scientist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and an author of the new study, the discovery means a more recent time in Martian history, per Space.com.
Zhurong's Instruments
China's Zhurong Mars rover has quite an array of instruments apart from its laser-induced breakdown spectrometer, named the Mars Surface Compound Detector (MarSCoDe), to study the Red Planet. According to NASA, the rover has a ground-penetrating radar that can detect ice buried 100-meters deep beneath the Martian surface -its most noteworthy instrument.
The Universities Space Research Association mentioned that Zhurong has a magnetometer, remote sensing spectrometer, multiple cameras, and a climate station. It uses its MarSCoDe and short-wave infrared spectrometer to perform in-situ measurements on the Red Planet.
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