![]() ![]() ![]() At Jezero’s western curve, an etched ancient riverbed gives way to a dried-out, fan-shaped delta on the crater floor. It sits in an older and much larger impact basin known as Isidis. The crater formed sometime between 3.7 billion and 4.1 billion years ago, in the solar system’s first billion years. Jezero is a shallow impact crater about 45 kilometers in diameter just north of the planet’s equator. ![]() JPL-CALTECH/NASA, ASU, MSSS Perseverance finds unexpected rocks On the floor of the Jezero crater (shown on July 28, 2021), Perseverance found rocks that were volcanic in nature, not the sedimentary rocks that scientists expected from a dry lake bed. “We’re seeing that everywhere.” And the rover still has much more to explore. Perseverance has turned up carbon-bearing materials - the basis of life on Earth - in every sample it has abraded, Horgan says. That volatility has slowed the search for sedimentary rocks, but it has also pointed to new alcoves where ancient life could have taken hold. Jezero has a more dynamic past than scientists had anticipated. This basin has witnessed flowing lava, at least one lake that lasted perhaps tens of thousands of years, running rivers that created a mud-and-sand delta and heavy flooding that brought rocks from faraway locales. Hundreds of researchers scouring the data Perseverance has sent back so far now have some clues to how the crater has evolved over time. Volcanic rock is just one of the surprises the rover has uncovered. Since landing, “we’ve been able to start putting together the story of what has happened in Jezero, and it’s pretty complex,” says Briony Horgan, a planetary scientist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., who helps plan Percy’s day-to-day and long-term operations. It’s also collecting samples to return to Earth. Drilling, scraping and collecting pieces of the Red Planet, the rover is using its seven science instruments to analyze the bits for any hint of ancient life. Jezero was picked for the Mars 2020 mission because it appears from orbit to be a former lake environment where microbes could have thrived, and its large delta would likely preserve any signs of them. While the earlier rovers focused on Martian geology and understanding the planet’s environment, Percy is looking for signs of past life. The most complex spacecraft to explore the Martian surface, Percy builds on the work of the Curiosity rover, which has been on Mars since 2012, the twin Spirit and Opportunity rovers, the Sojourner rover and other landers.īut Perseverance’s main purpose is different. Nicknamed Percy, the rover arrived at the Jezero crater two years ago, on February 18, 2021, with its sidekick helicopter, Ingenuity. It was not made up of the layers of clay and silt that would be found at a former lake bed. The visible shapes along with the chemical compositions showed that this rock, dubbed Rochette, was volcanic in origin. (The Mars surface-distance record is held by another NASA rover, Opportunity, which covered 28.06 miles, or 45.16 km, between 20.Then the scientists watched on a video conference as the rover’s two spectrometers revealed the chemistry of those meshed textures. For the past six years, the rover has been climbing through the mountain's foothills, reading the rocks for clues about Gale's past habitable environments and how Mars transitioned into the cold, dry desert planet we know today.ĭuring its eight years on Mars, Curiosity has drilled 27 rock samples, scooped up six soil samples and put more than 14 miles (23 km) on its odometer, NASA officials said. In September 2014, Curiosity reached the base of Mount Sharp, which rises 3.4 miles (5.5 kilometers) into the sky from Gale's center. (Abiotic processes can generate methane as well, however, and the source of the stuff within Gale is unclear.) In addition, the rover has rolled through several plumes of methane and discovered a seasonal pattern in the concentration of this gas, which here on Earth is primarily produced by living organisms. The nuclear-powered robot has returned exciting news on this front, finding that the crater hosted a potentially habitable lake-and-stream system for long stretches in the ancient past, perhaps millions of years at a time.Ĭuriosity has also detected complex organic chemicals, the building blocks of life as know it, in Gale Crater rocks. The main goal of Curiosity's $2.5 billion mission, officially known as Mars Science Laboratory, involves assessing whether Gale could ever have supported Earth-like life. ![]()
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