In 2018, NASA mission planners chosen the Jezero Crater as the long run touchdown website of the Perseverance rover. This crater was a pure selection, because it was as soon as an historic lake mattress, as evidenced by the delta fan at its western edge. On Earth, these options kind within the presence of flowing water that step by step deposits sediment over time. Combined with the truth that the Jezero Crater’s delta function is wealthy in clays, this makes the area a primary goal to seek for biosignatures – proof of previous (and possibly current) life on Mars!
In current information, NASA introduced that the Perseverance rover had reached the highest of Jezero Crater’s rim at a location the science group calls “Lookout Hill.” The rover spent the earlier three and a half months climbing the rim, protecting a distance of 500 vertical meters (1,640 vertical toes) and making science observations alongside the way in which. Now that it has crested the rim, Perseverance can start what the mission group calls its “Northern Rim” marketing campaign. Over the following yr, the rover is anticipated to drive 6.4 km (4 mi) and go to as much as 4 websites of curiosity the place it’ll acquire geological samples.
Since it landed within the Jezero Crater in February 2021, Perseverance has accomplished 4 science campaigns. This contains the “Crater Floor,” “Fan Front,” “Upper Fan,” and “Margin Unit” primarily based on the place the rover was acquiring samples from. During the primary marketing campaign, the rover visited options round its touchdown website – just like the Máaz formation – the place it obtained a number of rock and atmospheric samples, and a few witness samples for contamination evaluation. The two campaigns that adopted noticed the rover discover totally different sections of Jezero’s delta fan and acquire samples of rock and clay.
The fourth marketing campaign, in the meantime, consisted of the rover inspecting marginal carbonate rocks that circle the higher fringe of the Jezero Crater. The science group calls Perseverance’s fifth marketing campaign the “Northern Rim” as a result of its route covers the northern a part of the southwestern part of Jezero’s rim. The website was chosen in order that the rover may discover a area of Mars, in contrast to something it has investigated earlier than. Ken Farley, a venture scientist for Perseverance at Caltech, defined in a NASA press launch:
“The Northern Rim marketing campaign brings us utterly new scientific riches as Perseverance roves into basically new geology. It marks our transition from rocks that partially crammed Jezero Crater when it was fashioned by a large affect about 3.9 billion years in the past to rocks from deep down inside Mars that had been thrown upward to kind the crater rim after affect. These rocks symbolize items of early Martian crust and are among the many oldest rocks discovered wherever within the photo voltaic system. Investigating them may assist us perceive what Mars — and our personal planet — might have appeared like at first.”
Now that Perseverance has crested and moved on from Lookout Hill, the rover is heading to a rocky outcrop about 450 m (1,500 toes) on the opposite aspect of the rim referred to as “Witch Hazel Hill.” Said Candice Bedford, a Perseverance scientist from Purdue University:
“The marketing campaign begins off with a bang as a result of Witch Hazel Hill represents over 330 toes [~100 m] of layered outcrop, the place every layer is sort of a web page within the e book of Martian historical past. As we drive down the hill, we shall be going again in time, investigating the traditional environments of Mars recorded within the crater rim. Then, after a steep descent, we take our first turns of the wheel away from the crater rim towards ‘Lac de Charmes,’ about 2 miles [3.2 km] south.”
Located on the plains past the rim, the Lac de Charmes area is of curiosity to the mission group as a result of it’s much less more likely to have been affected by the affect that led to the Jezero Crater. Beyond that, the rover will journey about 1.6 km (1 mi) again up the rim to analyze an outcropping of blocks (megabreccia) which may be the stays of historic bedrock damaged by one other affect. This was the Isidis affect, which occurred 3.9 billion years in the past and led to the formation of the Isidis Planitia basin within the Northern Lowlands.
Investigating this website may present useful perception into a serious surface-reshaping occasion that came about throughout the Noachian Period on Mars. This geological epoch noticed in depth erosion by flowing water, as indicated by the numerous river valley networks dated to the interval. It can be throughout the Noachian that the Tharsis Bulge is believed to have fashioned, indicating that Mars was nonetheless geologically energetic. As all the time, the final word objective is to search out biosignatures from this “hotter, wetter” interval that point out that Mars may have had life (much like Earth on the time).
The Perseverance science group additionally shared data on the rover, their science operations, and future plans at a media briefing on Thursday, December twelfth, throughout the annual assembly of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in Washington. As Steven Lee, the deputy venture supervisor for the Perseverance mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, mentioned throughout the briefing:
“During the Jezero Crater rim climb, our rover drivers have achieved an incredible job negotiating among the hardest terrain we’ve encountered since touchdown. They developed modern approaches to beat these challenges — even tried driving backward to see if it could assist — and the rover has come by means of all of it like a champ. Perseverance is ‘go’ for the whole lot the science group needs to throw at it throughout this subsequent science marketing campaign.”
Further Reading: NASA
