Lal, Mursan and Hilsa are three craters on the surface of Mars, discovered by Ahmedabad‘s Physical Research Laboratory (PRL), that could hold proof that there was water on the red planet at some point in the past.
The biggest crater of the three – Lal – has been named after the late Professor Devendra Lal, a legendary cosmic ray physicist from Varanasi and the director of PRL between 1972 and 1983.
Mursan is named after a town in Uttar Pradesh’s Hathras district, and Hilsa after a town in Bihar’s Nalanda district.
PRL director Anil Bhardwaj explained the choice to Times of India, saying that these names were chosen in accordance with international guidelines which state that small craters should be named after small towns and bigger ones after renowned personalities.
These craters reside within the Tharsis volcanic region, a vast volcanic plateau centered near the equator in the western hemisphere of Mars, wihch is home to the largest volcanoes in the solar system. ‘Lal’ – the largest – spans around 65km. It is covered with lava, but there is geophysical evidence of material other than lava in this crater with a 45m thick sedimentary deposit in the subsurface. The discovery provides compelling proof that water has moved large volumes of sediments into the crater. Two small superimposed craters on either side, ‘Mursan’ and ‘Hilsa’, provide a timeline for the process of ‘Lal’s’ infilling.
According to an article published by scientists Rajiv Bharti, Isaac Smith, S K Mishra, N Srivastava and Shital Shukla, the discovery was made within the Mangala crater of Mars using SHARAD (Mars SHAllow RADar sounder), a subsurface sounding radar mounted on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter probe, a spacecraft designed to search for the existence of water on Mars as part of NASA‘s Mars Exploration Programme.