It has captured images that suggest dramatic weather events — and perhaps a climactic change — occurred on Mars billions of years ago.

It has captured images that suggest dramatic weather events — and perhaps a climactic change — occurred on Mars billions of years ago.

But when it’s the Perseverance rover photographing the Martian landscape and capturing evidence of dramatic weather events — and perhaps a climactic change — that occurred on this now-desolate planet billions of years ago, the images are indeed intriguing.

This glimpse into Mars’ wetter period of roughly 3.7 billion years ago is compelling because it coincides with the time when the Earth had only single-cell life forms, said Roger Wiens, the lab’s principal investigator for SuperCam.

And around 3 billion years ago, Mars shut down and became uninhabitable while life on Earth continued to burgeon, he said.

A NASA scientist agreed that Mars has far more geological remnants that are billions of years old than Earth does.

“It is very rare to find rocks on Earth that are this old,” said Katie Stack Morgan, deputy project scientist on the Mars rover mission.

Earth, unlike Mars, has tectonics that lead to its crust constantly recycling, Stack Morgan said.

“This gives us a chance to learn something fundamentally new about the solar system — not just Mars, but also this period when our planet was becoming habitable,” Stack Morgan said.

SuperCam’s remote micro-imager captured terrestrial features confirming rivers flowed into a lake that is now Jezero Crater, a big contribution to the Mars mission, Stack Morgan said.

The camera also will help scientists learn about where the rover collects samples and whether they were in a younger or older area of Mars, she said, noting that it’s better to determine those facts before hauling the stuff to Earth.