Los Angeles (ANTARA) – NASA’s Perseverance rover has completed 1,000 Mars days of operation on the Red Planet, according to the United States (US) space agency.
A day on Mars, known as a “sol”, is 24 hours and 37 minutes long, about 40 minutes longer than a day on Earth.
Perseverance and its robotic partner, the Ingenuity helicopter, landed in Mars’ Jezero Crater on February 18, 2021. Since then, the car-sized rover has continued to search for signs of ancient Martian life at the bottom of Jezero Crater.
Recently, the Perseverance rover completed its exploration of an ancient river delta that holds evidence of the existence of a lake that filled the Jezero Crater billions of years ago, NASA said.
So far, the six-wheeled rover has collected a total of 23 samples, and in the process succeeded in uncovering the geological history of the Martian region.
“We chose Jezero Crater as the landing site because orbital imagery shows the presence of a delta, clear evidence that a large lake once filled the crater. Lakes are a potentially habitable environment, and delta rocks are a good environment for burying signs of ancient life as a fossil in the geological record,” said Perseverance project scientist Ken Farley of the California Institute of Technology.
The main goal of the Perseverance mission on Mars is astrobiology, including looking for signs of ancient microbial life. According to NASA, the rover will describe Mars’ past geology and climate, paving the way for human exploration of the planet, as well as being the first mission to collect and store Martian rocks and regolith.
2023-12-14 07:13:17
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