It’s hard enough to cross Mars when you’re on flat terrain. It is sandy, dusty, rocky, windy and cold. NASA’s Perseverance rover is about to face all of those conditions, but this time climbing to the edge of Jezero Crater. NASA announced the rover’s ambitious travel plans this week. The wheeled explorer will tackle slopes of up to 23 degrees and gain 1,000 feet of elevation during the trip.
Perseverance arrived at Jezero Crater in February 2021. It explored an ancient lake and a river delta within the crater. Now it points to the western rim of the crater. ” Perseverance completed four clinical campaigns, collected 22 rock cores, and traveled more than 18 miles unpaved,” Art Thompson, Perseverance’s assignment manager, said in an Aug. 14 statement. “As we start the Crater Rim campaign, our rover is in perfect condition and the team is eager to see what’s on the roof of this place.
The ascent is expected to begin the week of August 19 and may only take months. It will come with “some of the steepest and most challenging terrain the rover has encountered to date,” NASA said. Important clinical awards may be expected at the summit. NASA is interested in a domain nicknamed “Turquino Peak” with ancient fractures that may be related to ancient hydrothermal activity.
Another domain of interest is known as “Witch Hazel Hill. ” Witch Hazel Hill has light-hued bedrock that resembles an ordinary rock that Perseverance recently studied and modeled. The pattern of the rock called “Cheyava Falls” would possibly imply evidence of ancient microbes. life, but NASA says more studies are needed to understand the rover’s locations. Scientists would be very happy to find other rocks similar to Cheyava Falls.
Despite budget problems, NASA hopes to one day launch a return to Mars project. The project would aim to recover some rock patterns from Perseverance and bring them back to Earth for in-depth laboratory study. That’s what it would possibly take to get a definitive answer to one of our biggest questions about Mars: was there ever microbial life? Astrobiology, added to the search for symptoms of ancient life, is one of the main objectives of the Perseverance project.
Researchers are eagerly awaiting long-term discoveries by the rover on the crater rim. They hope to locate rocks from the ancient crust of the Red Planet. “These rocks formed from a multitude of other processes, and some constitute potentially habitable ancient environments that have never been extensively tested before,” said Perseverance scientist Eleni Ravanis of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Ravanis is one from the clinical leaders of the Crater Rim campaign.
It will take a combination of human and robotic intelligence to get Perseverance to its target safely. The rover’s planners chose a direction designed to avoid hazards. The rover will make some of its own driving decisions by employing its automatic navigation programming. Although the slope will be steep, NASA intends to avoid slopes greater than 30 degrees. Perseverance will pause to stop at attractions and conduct clinical research along the way. It will be a triumphant moment when, despite everything, it emerges from the crater rim. The prospects deserve to be impressive.
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