The car-sized Perseverance rover landed inside the Red Planet's Jezero
Crater on Feb. 18, 2021, tasked with searching for signs of ancient Mars
life and collecting dozens of samples for future return to Earth.
The 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) Jezero is a great place to do such work on
Mars, mission team members say, because it hosted a big lake and a river
delta in the ancient past. Here on Earth, river deltas are great at
preserving carbon-containing organic compounds — the building blocks of life
as we know it — and residues of life itself, so Perseverance's handlers are
eager to check Jezero's delta out. And they should start doing so in earnest
in the coming months.
"For the mission's second year, we are incredibly excited to finally get to
the delta," Perseverance science team member Briony Horgan, an associate
professor of planetary science at Purdue University, said in a video
released by the school this week.
"The delta in Jezero Crater is the reason we chose the landing site, and we
hope to get to it later this spring," Horgan said. "Once we're there, we'll
be able to look at the bottom of the ancient lake that once filled Jezero to
search for signs of ancient microbial life, and we plan to spend the whole
next year traveling through the ancient lake deposits and ancient river
deposits that are within the delta."
An eventful first year
Perseverance isn't the only NASA robot exploring Jezero Crater. The rover
landed with a tiny helicopter named Ingenuity, which was designed to show
that aerial exploration is possible on Mars despite the planet's thin air.
(The atmosphere of Mars is just 1% as dense as that of Earth at sea level.)
Ingenuity deployed from Perseverance's belly on April 3. Over the next five
weeks, the 4-pound (1.8 kilograms) chopper made five pioneering flights,
which the rover supported and documented for posterity. (All communications
between Ingenuity and Earth are routed through Perseverance.)
With Ingenuity's primary mission successfully completed, Perseverance was
free to start focusing more exclusively on its own needs. The rover began
its first science campaign in early June and attempted to collect its first
sample two months later.
Perseverance has built upon that initial success, collecting five more rock
cores to date. Technically, these six cores constitute just three samples,
because the mission team collects a replicate at each site. (The rover also
totes an "atmospheric sample" — the sealed tube from the unsuccessful first
coring attempt.)
The six cores all appear to be taken from rocks that were part of an ancient
lava flow, Horgan said. That's exciting, she added, because volcanic rock
can be dated precisely in labs on Earth. So, once Perseverance's samples
land here — which could happen as early as 2031 — scientists will be able to
gain a better understanding of Jezero's history and evolution.
Jezero's igneous rocks also appear to have been altered by interaction with
liquid water, said Kevin Hand of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
Southern California, the co-leader of Perseverance's first science
campaign.
That's not terribly surprising, given that Jezero hosted a body of water as
big as Lake Tahoe billions of years ago. But the finding is important and
exciting, because "water-rock interactions can yield chemical energy that
can help potentially give rise to life and power life," Hand told Space.com.
The road ahead
Perseverance has already begun investigating Jezero's ancient delta,
examining a hill called Kodiak that's an isolated remnant of the
feature.
This work — done early in the mission from afar, using Perseverance's
Mastcam-Z imaging suite and a camera on its rock-zapping SuperCam instrument
— was fruitful, confirming the existence of the long-ago lake and river
delta. But up-close looks will be far more productive, and they should be
coming soon.
During its first science campaign, Perseverance has explored a large patch
of Jezero, cruising all the way to a rugged part of the crater floor called
South SéÃtah. But that phase of the mission is now wrapping up, and the
rover is heading back toward its landing site.
Such backtracking was the plan all along; it's the safest way to get to the
delta, the target location for the mission's second science campaign. Going
there directly from South SéÃtah would be a risky proposition, forcing
Perseverance to cross sand dunes and other rough terrain.
Perseverance has been making great time during the return journey, covering
at least 787 feet (240 meters) of ground recently on two different days —
farther than any other Mars rover has ever gone in a single day. Such
driving feats are enabled by Perseverance's autonomous navigation feature,
which puts the route-picking largely in the rover's hands.
"The rover planners — the brilliant engineers who drive the rover — have got
full license right now to employ autonav on the rover and drive, drive,
drive," Hand said.
Perseverance will likely be back in the landing-site region within the next
two weeks, he added. Once there, the rover will collect two core samples
from a rock that the mission team calls "Chal" (Navajo for "frog"). After
that, it will be time to high-tail it toward the delta.
The team hasn't decided which part of the delta to target, Hand said;
Perseverance may roll to Kodiak, or it may head for a piece of the larger,
contiguous structure.
Wherever Perseverance goes in the near future, it will likely get some help
from a friend. Ingenuity is still going strong, flying now under an extended
mission that NASA granted after the little chopper wrapped up its
technology-demonstrating campaign last May.
Ingenuity now has 19 Red Planet flights under its belt, and many of them
have gathered valuable reconnaissance data for the Perseverance team. Hand
described Ingenuity's longevity as the biggest surprise of Perseverance's
mission to date. And it's been a pleasant surprise, to say the least.
"Ingenuity is still pioneering incredible vistas that have helped guide us
with the path forward for Perseverance," Hand said.
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