Was the Red Planet... once Blue?
since last week — details how researchers used the first-ever radar imager data from China's Zhurong Mars rover to peer below the Red Planet's surface, where they found evidence suggesting that one or more catastrophic floods may have shaped Mars' vast Utopia Planitia plains.
Though the imager didn't detect any water in the roughly 80 vertical meters it surveyed, it did discover two horizontal layers that reflected back large boulders underneath smaller rocks. The researchers say these layers, the first and "youngest" of which was between 10 and 30 meters down with the older, deeper, and thicker layer around 30 to 80 meters in depth, could indicate two distinct flooding incidents whose rapid waters carried sediments that eventually became boulders. The shallower layer's flood likely took place, the Chinese Academy of Sciences researchers say, around 1.
rover — are nevertheless a huge step in figuring out how Mars got to be so dead, and whether it ever could have supported life.
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