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.

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