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The Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover searches for signs of ancient microbial life, to advance NASA's quest to explore the past habitability of Mars. The rover is collecting core samples of Martian rock and soil (broken rock and soil), for potential pickup by a future mission that would bring them to Earth for detailed study.
Earth planning date: Wednesday, May 15, 2024 Recently, our intrepid rover has been channeling its namesake while navigating through difficult terrain as we march on through the margin unit. Despite the shorter drives, the team continues to make good progress…
Jul 24, 2023 · By Nola Taylor Tillman, Mike Wall. last updated 24 July 2023. The Perseverance rover is hunting for signs of ancient life and cache samples for future return to Earth.
Jul 20, 2023 · The Perseverance rover is the first step of the campaign, a joint effort by NASA and ESA (European Space Agency) that seeks to bring scientifically selected samples back from Mars to be studied on Earth with lab equipment far more complex than could be sent to the Red Planet.
- Overview
- ‘Going to the buffet’
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More than 15 months after landing in Jezero Crater on Mars, NASA’s Perseverance rover has finally begun its hunt for ancient life in earnest.
On 28 May, Perseverance ground a 5-centimetre-wide circular patch into a rock at the base of what was once a river delta in the crater. This delta formed billions of years ago, when a long-vanished river deposited layers of sediment into Jezero, and it is the main reason that NASA sent the rover there. On Earth, river sediment is usually teeming with life.
Images of the freshly ground spot show small sediment grains, which scientists are hoping will contain chemical or other traces of life. Poet William Blake’s “‘To see a world in a grain of sand’ comes to mind,” wrote Sanjeev Gupta, a planetary geologist at Imperial College London, on Twitter.
Perseverance landed in February 2021, several kilometres from the delta’s edge. It spent many of its early months exploring the crater floor — which unexpectedly is made of igneous rocks, a type that forms as molten materials cool. That was a scientific jackpot because scientists can date igneous rocks on the basis of the radioactive decay of their chemical elements. But many researchers have been keen for Perseverance to get to the delta, whose fine-grained sediments have the best chance of harbouring evidence of Martian life.
The rover finally arrived at the delta’s base in April. It soon spotted grey, thinly layered rocks called mudstones, which could have formed from sediments deposited by a slow river or lake. It also found sandstones with coarse grains, which might have formed in a fast-flowing river. These kinds of rock are excellent targets for studying a variety of Martian environments where life could have thrived, Katie Stack Morgan, Perseverance’s deputy project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said on 17 May during the online portion of the 2022 Astrobiology Science Conference.
Mission engineers then drove Perseverance away from this region, named Enchanted Lake, and towards another area known as Hawksbill Gap, where it is currently working. The freshly abraded patch was made in a sandstone in one of the lowest rock layers in the delta, which means it is one of the oldest rocks formed by Jezero’s ancient river and thus an excellent place to hunt for signs of ancient life.
The delta rises about 40 metres above the crater floor. Rover drivers plan to send Perseverance up the front of the delta and then back down again, assessing where and how to take samples. “It’s like going to the buffet before you fill your plate,” says Jennifer Trosper, the mission’s project manager at JPL. On the way up, it will scout the rocks, including abrading more patches to see rock interiors. On the way down, it will drill and collect samples of the most intriguing ones.
Like a child assembling a set of gemstones for their prized collection, mission scientists are deliberating over which rocks the rover should sample to amass the most geologically diverse cache. Perseverance carries 43 tubes for samples, each a little thicker than a pencil. NASA and ESA are planning to bring around 30 filled tubes back to Earth.
A year on Mars: How NASA’s Perseverance hit a geological jackpot
Jan 30, 2023 · News. By Mike Wall. published 30 January 2023. The depot will serve as a backup, in case Perseverance can't deliver its onboard samples to a rocket-toting lander. Comments (1) NASA's...
Feb 17, 2023 · 6 min read. NASA’s Perseverance Rover Set to Begin Third Year at Jezero Crater. After completing the first sample depot on another world, the rover continues its hunt for Mars rocks worthy of study on Earth.
