PSI: Pathfinder May Have Explored Edges of Early Mars Sea

[bystander]

Pathfinder May Have Explored Edges of Early Mars Sea in 1997
Planetary Science Institute | 2019 Mar 14

Left: View of the Sojourner rover from the Pathfinder lander. According to our paper, a large proportion of the rocks could have been eroded from the sea’s margin by spillover floods. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Right: Approximately 3.4 billion years ago Mars experienced huge catastrophic floods. This panel shows a paleogeographic reconstruction of the circum-Chryse region, which at that time included the flood-produced inland sea and part of the northern plains ocean. The Pathfinder landing site (crosshair symbol) is located on an enormous spillway that connected the inland sea and the northern ocean. Credit: MOLA Science Team, MSS, JPL, NASA

---

NASA’s first rover mission to Mars, the Pathfinder, imaged an extraterrestrial marine spillover landscape 22 years ago, according to a new paper by Planetary Science Institute Senior Scientist Alexis Rodriguez.

The landing site is on the spillway of an ancient sea that experienced catastrophic floods released from the planet’s subsurface and its sediments. This could potentially yield evidence of Martian habitability ...

Nearly half a century ago the Mariner 9 spacecraft returned images of some of the largest channels in the Solar System. Orbital observations of the gigantic channels suggested they were formed approximately 3.4 billion years ago by cataclysmic floods, much larger than any known to have occurred on Earth. The prospect that abundant flowing water once sculptured the Martian landscape ignited renewed interest in the possibility that life may have once thrived on the planet.

To test the Martian mega-flood hypothesis, NASA deployed its first Martian rover; the Sojourner, on board the 1997 Mars Pathfinder spacecraft that journeyed to the red planet. NASA spent a total of $280 million on the mission, including the launch vehicle and mission operations. The terrain within the rover’s visual range includes potential fluvial features suggestive of regionally extensive flooding. However, those features suggest floods that were at least 10 times shallower than those estimated using images obtained from orbit. Hence, the mission was not able to exclude still disputed alternative views sustaining that debris or lavas flows could have in fact dominated the channels’ formational history without significant water discharges. ...

The 1997 Mars Pathfinder Spacecraft Landing Site:
Spillover Deposits from an Early Mars Inland Sea ~ J. A. P. Rodriguez et al

• Scientific Reports 9:4045 (25 Feb 2019) DOI: 10.1038/s41598-019-39632-1