Mars Once Scoured By Flood

Pictures from the Mars Pathfinder provide convincing evidence that that part of the now-dry planet was inundated by an ancient flood thousands of times bigger than this spring’s disaster in the Dakotas, scientists said today.

The flood that scoured the area where the spacecraft landed was hundreds of yards deep and extended from horizon to horizon, said Michael Malin, a specialist in catastrophic flooding around the world.

The comparable flood on Earth “was the flood that filled the Mediterranean Basin,” he said.

The evidence came from detailed pictures taken by a camera aboard the Pathfinder as the mission’s Sojourner rover crept across the red landscape studying soil and rocks.

At a briefing Monday, NASA displayed detailed photographs of a harsh landscape that bears unmistakable, ancient signs of water - a basic requirement for life.

The flood appears to have carried rocks from the planet’s highlands and deposited them in the valley where Pathfinder landed Friday, scientists said.

The position and tilts of rocks seen in the photos indicated that water surged powerfully through the site. It stacked up boulders like Keystone Kops, leaving behind puddles that eventually evaporated and created crusty mineral deposits that cracked when Pathfinder’s air bags retracted. Sojourner will later analyze such deposits.

Also Monday, scientists plotted an off-road adventure for the Mars rover, sending it to churn up the red dirt with its wheels on its way to photograph a burly rock known as “Yogi” on a continued voyage among signposts of early water on the planet.

In the dry language of science, the 22-pound Sojourner rover will conduct a “material abrasion experiment” on a slow-motion, 6-foot crawl across the landscape that will leave it 16 feet from the Pathfinder spacecraft that carried it to the red planet.

Sojourner spent Sunday night sitting next to the boulder dubbed Barnacle Bill. An instrument called a spectrometer mounted on the rover was used to study the rock’s chemical makeup.

Measurements from the instrument were to be sent back to Earth late Monday, and the analysis of the data will be available today, along with analysis of a spectrometer reading on the soil where the rover first touched down, project scientist Matthew Golombek said.

Sojourner’s pint-sized prospecting trip has NASA scientists overflowing with enthusiasm over proving they can direct the little robot with such precision from 119 million miles away.