Science & technology | New from the solar system

The Moon and Mars give up more secrets

A Chinese and an American mission report their latest results

THIS PICTURE of a set of sedimentary rocks, just published in Science, could have come from any geology textbook. Its illustration of the bottomset-foreset-topset transition found in river deltas is a classic of stratigraphy. Except that, technically, it is not a geological feature at all. The word “geology” derives from the Greek for “Earth discourse”. The rocks in question, however, are on Mars.

This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “Other-worldly”

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