Last week, NASA announced that the Perseverance rover reached the milestone of 1000 Martian days in operation and that all its tasks were completed. However, the rover’s journey is not over, it will now head off on a bonus mission, where it will continue to investigate the surface of Mars.
During the initial mission, the Perseverance rover worked inside Jezero Crater, near the delta of an ancient river, collecting rocks and Martian soil. In total, 10 tubes full of samples were collected and launched onto the ground to be collected on a future mission, the Mars Sample Return (MSR), scheduled to be launched in 2030.
- The bonus mission will begin in the spring of the northern hemisphere and will lift the rover along the crater rim or even beyond.
- To leave Jezero, the rover will have to travel about 4 kilometers from its current position to the beginning of its exit path.
- The idea is to investigate even older rocks and fill the remaining 13 sample tubes on board the rover.
Researchers believe that the groundwater in this new region to be investigated by the rover interacted with the rocks, creating a completely different scenario from the interior of the crater.
View of Jezero Crater (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS)
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Perseverance investigations
The samples collected so far have helped scientists understand how Jezero Crater, once flooded by a long-running river, became the boulder-strewn desert found by Perseverance.
Furthermore, according to NASA, investigations carried out by Perseverance’s instruments indicated the presence of carbonate materials and iron phosphate in the crater, substances that could have helped life thrive there. The discovered silica could also preserve any old organic molecules and prevent their degradation, but nothing has yet been found.
Sample return mission
A robust analysis carried out with robust instruments on Earth will allow more details about the samples collected by the rover to be revealed. However, MSR has encountered some problems, this is because the mission is excessively expensive and has not yet defined all the details.
One of these impasses is precisely due to the bonus mission. At MSR, Perseverance will deposit the samples stored inside a landing module, which will send them into Martian orbit. An orbiter will collect the material and send it to Earth.
However, the exact location where the module and the rover will meet has not yet been defined. That’s because, by the 2030s, Perseverance will be a long way from the initial cache of samples at the bottom of the crater. The options are to land the module close to where Perseverance is, or have the rover return to the crater.
2023-12-18 22:15:00
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