The Next Best Thing to Jezero Crater This Side of Mars

You may not be able to travel to Jezero Crater on , but you can visit the next best thing: Lake Salda, Turkey.

Researchers are using their understanding of Lake Salda to help guide the Mars 2020 mission, which will drop the Perseverance rover into the crater to search for signs of ancient life. “One of the great things about visiting Lake Salda is it really gives you a sense of what it would have been like to stand on the shores of ancient Lake Jezero,” said Briony Horgan, a planetary scientist at Purdue University and member of the Perseverance science team.

“Carbonates are important because they are really good at trapping anything that existed within that environment, such as microbes, organics, or certain textures that provide evidence of past microbial life,” said Brad Garczynski, a graduate student at Purdue who works with Horgan. “But before we go to Jezero, it is really important to gain context on how these carbonates form on Earth in order to focus our search for signs for life.”

In August 2019, Garczynski took this photo of an exposed microbialite island on Lake Salda. Collaborating with colleagues at the Istanbul Technical University, the Purdue research team spent almost a week surveying the lake’s perimeter and surrounding area. Garczynski said these islands are expected to erode over time and will eventually be transported, reworked, and deposited as beach sediments along the shoreline.

Comments

Party Pairs

Atoms in a gas can seem like partiers at a nanoscopic rave, with particles zipping around, pairing up, and flying off again in a seemingly random fashion. And yet physicists have come up with formulas that predict this behavior, even when the atoms are extremely close together and can tug and pull on each other in complicated ways. The environment within the nucleus of a single atom seems similar, with protons and neutrons also dancing about. But because the nucleus is such a compact space, scientists have struggled to pin down the behavior of these particles, known as nucleons, in an atom’s nucleus. Models that describe the interactions of nucleons that are far apart broken down when the particles pair up and interact at close range. Now an MIT-led team has simulated the behavior of protons and neutrons in several types of atomic nuclei, using some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. The team explored a wide range of nuclear interaction models and found, surprising...

Microsoft to launch xCloud game

Microsoft is all set to launch its much-anticipated game streaming service called xCloud on September 15 for Android users in 22 countries. South Korea will be the only Asian country for the xCloud service's global launch and India is not part of the list as of now. Project xCloud will be bundled as part of the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription for $14.99 per month, with more than 100 games available on Android tablets and phones. "Cloud gaming will launch in beta for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate members in 22 markets to ensure stability as we scale the feature to millions of gamers," Kareem Choudhry, Corporate Vice President, Project xCloud, Microsoft, said in a statement on Tuesday. The game streaming service allows users to play Microsoft's console Xbox games on mobile phones and tablets using Cloud technology. On September 11, the currently free-to-play xCloud beta will be discontinued and replaced by the version included in Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. Once the servi...

Pratham-Tech-Talks

Search This Blog