NASA’s Mars rover has reached a major mission milestone.
persistence You’ve safely reached the remnants of the ancient Red Planet’s River Delta on the floor of the 28-mile (45-kilometer) wide Jezero Crater, NASA announced today (April 19).
Expedition team members say the delta will be a “real geological feast” for the perseverance, which is looking for signs of fossils. life of mars. (The promising rock will be cached for a sample return mission campaign that NASA and its European partners will launch later this decade.)
Ken Farley, a persistence project scientist at Caltech, said in a statement statement Wednesday (19 April) from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which runs the Perseverance mission.
Now that the rover is in the area, Farley added, the next step will be to “obtain more detailed images that reveal the best places to explore this important rock.”
Related: 12 stunning photos from the Perseverance rover’s first year on Mars
Perseverance landed in February 2021 inside Jezero Crater, which expedition scientists say hosted a lake and river delta billions of years ago. Such conditions must be microbially viable, meaning that the delta region is a rich region to look for signs Mars live (if any).
The craft operated somewhat south and west of its landing site during its first year (on Earth) Mars But he had just returned through the landing zone to reach Delta. Perseverance will spend next week driving southwest and west to see how best to explore this stretch of the delta.
Persistence data indicate that deltaic deposits lie approximately 130 feet (40 meters) above the crater floor, and the team is considering two options, according to a JPL statement. The preferred route, at least for now, is through the area called the “eagle’s beak gap”, as it appears to be easier to access in less time. But a backup option, Cape Nokshak, is available if data in the coming days suggests it is the safer route.
“Wherever Perseverance takes the path to the plateau above the delta, the team will conduct detailed scientific research, including core rock sampling, on the way, then turn around and do the same on the way back,” a JPL official at JPL said. Statement.
Rover will spend nearly six months taking eight samples during this maneuvering campaign, called the Delta Front. The plan would then require persistence to get to the top of the delta again, and possibly create a backup option to sample areas that had never been traveled before, to spend another six months in the “Top Delta Campaign”.
“Delta is the reason we sent persistence to Jezero Crater: It has a lot of interesting features,” says Farley. “We’re looking for signs of ancient life in rocks at the bottom of the delta, rocks that we believe were mud at the bottom of Lake Jezero.
Perseverance will also try to pick up shards of sand and rock emerging from the top of the river, in areas that the rover would not expect to visit during its lifetime on Mars. Geography will be of great help, Farley says: “We can take advantage of the ancient Martian rivers that lead us to the geological secrets of the planet.”
JPL officials added that Perseverance started its second science expedition a month earlier than expected, due to its independent hazard detection system that allowed it to avoid obstacles in Jezero Crater such as boulders, sharp rocks, pits and sand pits. (Investigators were ordered to stop and make 55 turns to avoid danger during this final ground flight, JPL added.)
Instead, NASA’s decade-old Curiosity Mars spacecraft should do just that came back recently From the striped path due to the treacherous terrain of “Crocodile Return”. Curiosity also has an older version of the Mars wheel that is less optimized for sometimes treacherous terrain, compared to Perseverance. JPL office Say That Percy wheels have twice the number of surfaces and soft curves, which are more adaptable to the terrain.
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