JEZERO CRATER – The Perseverance rover has begun a long climb up the steep rim of Jezero Crater in search of some of the oldest rocks on Mars and the prospect of environments that may have once supported life on the Red Planet.
Landing in Jezero Crater three and a half years ago, the rover has since explored the site of an ancient lake and river delta and collected rock samples. But his latest clinical journey could rewrite the way astronomers perceive Mars.
“Perseverance completed 4 science campaigns, collected 22 rock cores, and traveled more than 18 unpaved miles,” Art Thompson, Perseverance assignment manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. “As we begin the crater rim campaign, our rover is up and running and the team is eager to see what’s on the roof of this place. “
The rover will use its automatic navigation capabilities, which allow Perseverance to function as a self-driving car, to follow a direction planned by the vehicle’s engineers. The direction will allow the rover to avoid the risks of the complicated ascent. Perseverance will gain about 1,000 feet in altitude when it reaches the summit in late 2024.
This ascension is something scientists have been waiting for years, long before Perseverance landed on Mars.
About four billion years ago, some type of object slammed into Mars and created Jezero Crater, affecting huge uplifted blocks of rock that became trapped on the crater rim.
“We’ll be able to access and model some of the oldest rocks on Mars at the crater rim,” said Briony Horgan, a co-investigator on the Perseverance rover project and a professor of planetary sciences at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.
“We think this includes everything from the ancient sedimentary rocks that can support the first habitable environments on Mars, to the planet’s building blocks that shaped the first crust of the solar system. “
The crater rim will provide a window into the earliest era of Mars’ history and may reveal evidence of hot springs that may have supported ancient microbial life, Horgan said.
Going to the Martian era
The impact that created Jezero Crater also generated a lot of heat, in part due to the force of the object that hit Mars. Some of the heat also came from warmer rocks that existed beneath the Martian surface, as the planet was still cooling after forming components a billion years earlier. They affected the uplift of those rocks beneath the Martian surface.
If Mars had underground or surface water at that time, which scientists say is likely, there would have been hydrothermal systems, said Ken Farley, a Perseverance mission scientist and professor of geochemistry at the California Institute of Technology.
In hydrothermal systems, hot water most likely flowed through cracks in the rocks and may have created an environment conducive to the progression of microbial life.
Climb to the crater
During the long journey up the crater wall, Perseverance may encounter slopes at an angle of about 23 degrees. Typically, the team avoids any direction that could tilt the rover more than 30 degrees. But the rover is well prepared for the climb and safe, Farley said.
“Climbing the crater rim, while it would be a bit of a strenuous adventure for us humans, from a rover perspective, won’t be too bad,” said Steven Lee, Perseverance’s deputy task manager.
But the rover’s progress would likely slow if it feels its wheels slipping on the Martian terrain or encounters giant rocks on its way up.
The Perseverance can monitor the terrain as it drives, and if its wheels spin too much, the rover will impede it and “call mom home, wait for them to tell her what to do, and we’ll locate a solution on the ground,” he said. said Lee.
By the time the rover climbs to the top of the rim, it will have traveled dozens of more miles and captured tons of new photographs for the project team to analyze.
“It’s an attitude unique to those of us who work on the task every day,” Lee said. “Very quickly, you start to have a concept of Mars as a place. My memories of Perseverance crossings are very similar to memories of a walk. I can think about what Mars looks like from the landing site to where we are today. “
And the rover above the 45-kilometer-wide crater will offer beautiful views.
“We’ll definitely have some perspectives from where we get to Jezero and the plains beyond,” Horgan said.
The biggest challenge for the science team will be determining which rocks to examine in depth and which rocks to sample. With so many intriguing school bus-sized rock piles, the team will want to stay informed as much as possible while keeping the rover moving.
“We’ll have all of those things in front of us,” Farley said, “so I think it’s going to be a very different type of exploration. “
Perseverance is expected to spend at least a few years beyond the crater rim collecting samples.
Meanwhile, questions arise about how those samples, as well as those collected through Perseverance in the crater, will return to Earth as NASA reassesses the Mars Sample Return program. The firm is comparing proposals and is expected to announce a resolution in the fall.
The resolution may determine how long and how far the rover travels, as the vehicle may simply be tasked with delivering samples to a spacecraft to bring back to Earth.
“This component of the project is critical to creating a pattern collection that is the collection that everyone dreams of,” Farley said. “For now, we will simply continue our investigation at the crater rim. And when the time comes, we’ll do anything. “