One of the navigation cameras aboard NASA’s Mars rover Perseverance captured this view looking down at the “Bright Angel” area on July 30, the 1,224th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
After 2 1/2 years of exploring the floor of Jezero Crater and the river delta, the rover will ascend to an area where it will search for further discoveries that could rewrite the history of Mars.
NASA’s Mars rover Perseverance will soon begin a monthlong climb to the western rim of Jezero Crater, likely including some of the steepest and most challenging terrain the rover has encountered to date. Scheduled to begin the week of August 19, the climb will kick off the mission’s new science campaign, its fifth since the rover landed in the crater on February 18, 2021.
“Perseverance has completed four science campaigns, collected 22 rock cores and traveled over 30 kilometers of unpaved terrain,” said Art Thompson, Perseverance project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “As we begin the Crater Rim campaign, our rover is in excellent shape, and the team is eager to see what’s on top of this place.”
Two of the priority regions the science team wants to study at the top of the crater are nicknamed “Pico Turquino” and “Witch Hazel Hill.” Images taken by NASA’s Mars probes indicate that Pico Turquino contains ancient fractures that may have been caused by hydrothermal activity in the distant past.
Witch Hazel’s orbital images show layered materials that likely date from a time when Mars had a very different climate than it does today. The images revealed a light-toned bedrock similar to that found at Bright Angel, the area where Perseverance recently discovered and sampled the Cheyava Falls rock, which has chemical signatures and structures that could have been formed by life billions of years ago, when the area contained running water.
This panorama shows the area that NASA’s Mars rover Perseverance will climb over the coming months to reach the rim of Jezero Crater. It is composed of 59 images taken by the rover’s Mastcam-Z on August 4. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS
It is sedimentary
During the river delta exploration phase of the mission, the rover collected the only sedimentary rock ever sampled on a planet other than Earth. Sedimentary rocks are important because they form when particles of different sizes are carried by water and deposited in a body of standing water; on Earth, liquid water is one of the most important conditions for life as we know it.
A study published Wednesday, August 14 in AGU Progress chronicles the 10 rock cores collected from sedimentary rocks in an ancient Martian delta, a fan-shaped collection of rocks and sediments that formed billions of years ago at the convergence of a river and a crater lake.
Core samples taken from the cone front are the oldest, while rocks taken from the cone summit are probably the youngest, produced when flowing water deposited sediments in the western cone.
“These rock cores are likely the oldest material sampled from a known potentially habitable environment,” said Tanja Bosak, a geobiologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and a member of Perseverance’s science team. “When we bring them back to Earth, they will be able to tell us a lot about when, why, and for how long Mars contained liquid water and whether organic, prebiotic, and potentially even biological evolution may have occurred on this planet.”
This map shows the route NASA’s Mars rover Perseverance will take (in blue) as it climbs the western rim of Jezero Crater, first reaching “Dox Castle” and then examining the “Pico Turquino” area before approaching “Witch Hazel Hill.” Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
On the way to the edge of the crater
As intriguing as the samples collected so far are scientifically, the mission expects many more discoveries to come.
“Our samples already represent an incredibly scientifically compelling collection, but the crater rim promises to provide even more samples that will have significant implications for our understanding of Martian geologic history,” said Eleni Ravanis, a University of Hawaii at Mānoa scientist on Perseverance’s Mastcam-Z instrument team and one of the lead scientists for the Crater Rim campaign.
“We hope to study rocks from the oldest crust of Mars. These rocks formed from a multitude of different processes, and some represent potentially habitable ancient environments that have never been examined in detail before.”
Reaching the crater’s summit won’t be easy. To get there, Perseverance will rely on its automated navigation capabilities, following a route designed by the rover’s planners to minimize hazards while leaving the science team with plenty to study. Encountering slopes of up to 23 degrees along the way (the rover’s drivers avoid terrain that would tilt Perseverance more than 30 degrees), the rover will have gained about 1,000 feet in elevation by the time it reaches the crater’s summit, at a spot the science team has dubbed “Aurora Park.”
Then, perched hundreds of meters above the floor of a crater stretching 45 kilometers across, Perseverance can begin the next stage of its adventure.
Quote: NASA’s Perseverance rover to begin long climb to Martian crater rim (2024, August 14) retrieved August 14, 2024 from
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