Zhurong Mars rover trundles on

[brian livesey]

China’s Mars rover has been exploring and sampling on the vast Utopia Planitia since arriving on the Martian surface last May. Since the landing, Zhurong has travelled almost two kilometres, gathering data about the nature of the terrain.
Data analyses returned to the Earth by the Mars rover indicates signs of water in minerals from 700 million years ago. Mars is regarded as having being a wet planet until around three billion years ago when the planet’s second geological period the Hesperian epoch came to an end. Now, in its Amazonian period, there’s no trace of water on the surface of the red planet.
Researchers say that the soil that has the minerals that Zhurong sampled had a hard crust that could have formed by rising ground water or melted ice. The European Space Agency’s orbiting Mars probe has detected water under the ice of the planet’s South Pole.