NASA: Lake Salda in Turkey is similar to Jezero Crater on Mars

* Photo: Archive - AA

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The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has announced that researchers are using their understanding of Lake Salda in Turkey to help guide the Mars 2020 mission, which will drop the Perseverance rover into the crater to search for signs of ancient life.

According to the NASA researchers, Turkey's Lake Salda shares similar mineralogy and geology as the dry Martian lakebed and it is, in fact, "the only known lake on Earth that contains the carbonates and depositional features (deltas) similar to those found at Jezero Crater."

Though located a world away, Lake Salda, #Turkey, has geological similarities to Jezero Crater on #Mars. In fact, researchers even did field work at Lake Salda to prepare for #CountdownToMars and @NASAPersevere. https://t.co/jrKoWrbVwe pic.twitter.com/xB2GGgYfbr

— NASA Earth (@NASAEarth) July 30, 2020

As pointed out by NASA in its social media post, the researchers have already done fieldwork at Lake Salda to prepare for the mission.

"One of the great things about visiting Lake Salda is it really gives you a sense of what it would have been like to stand on the shores of ancient Lake Jezero," says Briony Horgan, a planetary scientist at Purdue University and member of the Perseverance science team.

* Jezero Crater delta

* Lake Salda

Lake Salda will be turned into a 'Nation's Garden'

Lake Salda was declared a "specially protected environment area" by a Presidential decree in March 2019. The lake and its surrounding area is also a first-degree protected area.

It was decided to lodge a tender in July 2019 to construct a "Nation's Garden" in the region. The tender was postponed, it was held in autumn. Having bidden 21 million 770 thousand TRY to undertake the construction, Güngör Agriculture and Construction Inc. won the tender.

Salda Lake is formed by waters and surface waters from 2 million years ago. Permanent rivers such as Salda (Karakova) Brook, Doğanbaba Brook and Köpek Brook and seasonal rivers such as Karanlık Brook, Kuruçay and Kayadibi Brook flow into Lake Salda.

In Salda Lake Subbasin, the existence of 100 bird species has been documented; while 62 of these bird species are singing birds, 38 of them are water birds, 9 are accipitriformes and one is strigiforme. 75 of these species are protected by the Bern Convention. (TP/SD)