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Lake Salda Beach

Jan. 27, 2021
The eastern shore of Lake Salda in Turkey is a good analog for what an ancient lake may have looked like at Jezero Carter on Mars.

The eastern shore of Lake Salda in Turkey is a good analog for what an ancient lake may have looked like at Jezero Carter on Mars. The white sands and rocks are carbonate minerals that precipitated in the lake. The terraces on the right are old shorelines from when the lake levels were higher, where dried-out sediments have now cemented. These types of deposits might be present along the former shorelines at Jezero. What's more, these deposits might contain signs of microbes, if they ever existed on the Red Planet.

NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance mission will search for signs of ancient life in an dried-up lakebed on the surface of Mars.

A division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory built and will manage operations of the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover for the agency.

For more information about the mission, go to https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/.

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