A year on Mars: How NASA’s Perseverance rover hit a geological jackpot
. Researchers intended the US$2.7-billion rover to look for these signs in an ancient delta, where a river that once flowed into the crater deposited sediments and rocks — an environment that could have supported life. But the rover hasn’t reached it yet.Instead, Perseverance has spent the year rolling around the bottom of the crater, making a host of surprising discoveries — one of which is that Jezero’s floor is made of igneous rocks.
Before the rover landed, mission scientists didn’t know they were going to hit an igneous jackpot. “Jezero delivered,” says Katie Stack Morgan, the mission’s deputy project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.Scientists discovered that Jezero’s floor wasn’t what they expected when the rover began preparing to drill its first sample in August. Exploring the area’s geology, Perseverance ground into a piece of Martian rock to reveal a fresh surface.
The Seitah rocks, like the Maaz rocks, also show signs of having interacted with water in the past. They might even — as reported at a December meeting of the American Geophysical Union by Eva Scheller, a geologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena — contain organic molecules, probably produced through non-biological processes, such as those seen in some Martian meteorites.All told, Perseverance is supposed to collect at least 30 rock, dirt and atmosphere samples.
Time is of the essence because Perseverance has only about one Earth year remaining to meet the timetable for accomplishing its main to-do list: get to the delta, collect samples there, and drive up onto the crater rim to place them somewhere for pick-up. The rover is currently retracing its steps towards its landing site: it will collect another pair of cores from Maaz along the way, and then detour around the dune-filled region to reach the delta.
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