![]() PSI Senior Scientists Jeffrey Kargel and Daniel Berman are co-authors of the paper. "The lander was designed to seek evidence of extant life on the Martian surface, so to select a suitable landing site, the engineers and scientists at the time faced the arduous task of using some of the planet's earliest acquired images, accompanied by Earth-based radar probing of the planet's surface,” said Rodriguez, lead author of “ Evidence of an oceanic impact and megatsunami sedimentation in Chryse Planitia, Mars " that appears in Nature Scientific Reports. New research led by Planetary Science Institute Senior Scientist Alexis Rodriguez shows the landing site may be on the margins of a megatsunami deposit, formed when a 3-kilometer asteroid impacted a northern Martian ocean about 3.4 billion years ago. When NASA’s Viking 1 lander touched down on the surface of Mars nearly 50 years ago, its cameras imaged a boulder-strewn surface of elusive origin. The blue line traces the front of the younger megatsunami deposit. (c) Close-up view of Pohl showing that Pohl is covered by the younger of two previously proposed megatsunami deposits, indicating that the crater’s formation pre-dated the ocean’s disappearance. (b) Close-up view showing the superposition of Pohl (red triangle) on outflow channel-excavated bedforms, indicating that its formation happened after the ocean-generating floods. Credit: MOLA Science Team/MSS/JPL/NASA/Google Earth/PSI. We propose that the formation of Pohl crater (identified) generated the older megatsunami deposits of two previously documented by Rodriguez et al. Decades of research show that catastrophic floods likely formed these channels and a northern ocean approximately 3.4 billion years ago. ![]() (a) South-looking perspective view, showing where Mars’ most enormous outflow channels transition into the planet’s northern plains.
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