https://ift.tt/2OT0YRR There was plenty of reason to celebrate when the Perseverance rover successfully touched down in Mars’s Jezero Crater this afternoon. But in some ways, the rover showed up too late—3.5 billion years too late, in fact. Long ago, in an earlier epoch, as studies of Mars have shown, Jezero Crater was Jezero Lake, a 45 km (28 mi.) depression in the northern Martian hemisphere, fed with water via a channel that cut through the crater rim and spread into the lake in a graceful delta. There was atmosphere and there was warmth and there was ample water—and, all that being present, there may have been life. Not long after, however, Mars lost its magnetic field and thus 99% of its atmosphere and nearly all of its water, transforming the planet into the frigid desert it is today. But if that early life was ever present, it could still be there today—in the form of fossilized remains and organic material in the ancient silt of the desiccated lake. It’s for that ...
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