After three and a half years of exploring the backside of Jezero Crater and the river delta, NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover will ascend to a domain where it will search for other discoveries that could rewrite the history of Mars.
NASA’s Perseverance rover is embarking on a challenging ascent of the western rim of Jezero Crater, kicking off its fifth science crusade to explore key spaces such as Turquino Peak and Witch Hazel Hill, where symptoms of ancient hydrothermal activity and diverse climates can be found. collect and transport samples of Martian rocks to Earth, advancing our understanding of the geology, climate, and prospects for ancient life on Mars.
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover will soon begin a month-long climb up the western rim of Jezero Crater, which will likely include some of the steepest and most challenging terrain the rover has encountered to date. Scheduled to begin the week of August 19. The ascent will mark the beginning of the mission’s new scientific campaign, the fifth since the rover landed in the crater on February 18, 2021.
“Perseverance completed 4 science campaigns, collected 22 rock cores, and traveled more than 18 unpaved miles,” said Perseverance project manager Art Thompson of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “As we begin the Crater Rim campaign, our rover is in shape and the team is eager to see what’s on the roof of this place. “
Two of the priority regions that the science team wants to examine in the most sensitive part of the crater are nicknamed “Turquino Peak” and “Witch Hazel Hill”. Images from NASA’s Mars orbiters imply that ancient fractures are found on Turquino Peak that would have possibly been caused by hydrothermal activity in the remote past.
Orbital perspectives of Witch Hazel show layered curtains that likely date back to a time when Mars had a very different climate than today. These perspectives revealed a light-colored bedrock similar to the one discovered in “Bright Angel,” the domain where Perseverance recently discovered and sampled the “Cheyava Falls” rock, which exhibits chemical signatures and structures that may have been formed through billions of lifetimes. years ago when the domain contained running water.
During the river delta exploration phase, the rover collected the only sedimentary rock ever sampled on a planet other than Earth. Sedimentary rocks form because debris of other sizes is transported through water and deposited in a framework of standing water; On Earth, liquid water is one of the greatest wishes for life as we know it.
A paper published Aug. 14 in the clinical journal AGU Advances reports on 10 rock cores collected from sedimentary rocks in an ancient Martian delta, a fan-shaped collection of rocks and sediments that formed over billions of years at the convergence of a river. and a lake in a crater.
Cores taken from the front of the fan are the oldest, while rocks extracted in the most sensitive part of the fan are probably the youngest, produced through the deposition of water and sediment on the western fan.
“Among those rock cores are probably the oldest tissues sampled in a known potentially habitable environment,” said Tanja Bosak, a geobiologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and a member of the Perseverance science team. “When we bring them back to Earth, they will tell us a lot about when, why, and for how long Mars contained liquid water and whether organic, prebiotic, and potentially even biological evolution could have taken place on this planet. “
As intriguing as the samples have been so far, the project awaits many discoveries.
“Our samples already constitute an incredibly scientifically compelling collection, but the crater rim promises to provide even more samples that will have significant implications for our geological history of Mars,” said scientist Eleni Ravanis. from the University of Hawaii at Mānoa on the Perseverance Mastcam. The Z tool team and one of the scientific leaders of the Crater Rim campaign. “In fact, we plan to examine rocks from the oldest crust of Mars. These rocks formed from a multitude of other processes, and some constitute potentially habitable ancient environments that have never before been thoroughly tested.
Getting to the top of the crater may not be easy. To get there, Perseverance will rely on its automatic navigation capabilities as it follows a direction designed by the rover’s planners to minimize risks while providing the science team with many avenues of investigation. Encountering slopes of up to 23 degrees during the adventure (rover drivers avoid terrain that would tilt Perseverance more than 30 degrees), the rover will have gained about 1,000 feet (300 meters) of elevation by the time it reaches the crater rim. to a given location. the clinical team called it “Aurora Park. “
Then, perched many meters above the floor of a crater that stretches forty-five kilometers in diameter, Perseverance can begin the next level of its adventure.
Launched by NASA in July 2020, the Perseverance rover landed on Mars in Jezero Crater in February 2021 with a clear mission: to look for symptoms of ancient life and collect samples for an eventual return to Earth. This site was chosen because I had the idea of having been flooded with water and probably a habitable environment in the ancient past. Perseverance carries a suite of clinical tools designed to analyze Martian geology and atmosphere, adding ground-penetrating radar, a weather station, and the first Martian oxygen-producing experiment.
During its exploration, Perseverance also paves the way for long-duration human missions to Mars through generation demonstrations like the MOXIE experiment, which effectively generated oxygen from the Martian atmosphere. The rover’s findings will allow NASA to better understand the difficult conditions posed by the Martian atmosphere, informing plans for manned missions in the coming decades.
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