Perseverance Rover begins a steep climb up the Martian crater rim

After two and a half years of exploring the Jezero Crater’s floor and river delta, NASA’s Perseverance Rover is ready to push boundaries and climb up the Martian Crater rim.

This upcoming month-long journey, scheduled to begin the week of August 19, will undoubtedly include some of the steepest and most challenging landscapes the rover has experienced yet, marking the start of the mission’s fifth science campaign since its landing in February 2021.

“Perseverance has completed four science campaigns, collected 22 rock cores, and traveled over 18 unpaved miles,” said Art Thompson, Perseverance project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California.

“As we start the Crater Rim Campaign, our rover is in excellent condition, and the team is raring to see what’s on the roof of this place.”

Next stops on Martian crater tour

The scientific team is particularly interested in two key areas atop the crater, Pico Turquino and Witch Hazel Hill.

Imagery from NASA’s Mars orbiters indicates that Pico Turquino contains ancient fractures that may have been caused by hydrothermal activity in the distant past.

Orbital views of Witch Hazel show layered materials that likely date from a time when Mars had a very different climate than today.

Those views have revealed light-toned bedrock similar to what was found at “Bright Angel,” the area where Perseverance recently discovered and sampled the “Cheyava Falls” rock, which exhibits chemical signatures and structures that could possibly have been formed by life billions of years ago when the area contained running water.

The significance of sedimentary rock samples

During the river delta exploration phase of the mission, the rover collected the only sedimentary rock ever sampled from a planet other than Earth.

Sedimentary rocks are important because they form when particles of various sizes are transported by water and deposited into a standing body of water; on Earth, liquid water is one of the most important requirements for life as we know it.

“Among these rock cores are likely the oldest materials sampled from any known environment that was potentially habitable,” said Tanja Bosak, a geobiologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and member of Perseverance’s science team.

“When we bring them back to Earth, they can tell us so much about when, why, and for how long Mars contained liquid water and whether some organic, prebiotic, and potentially even biological evolution may have taken place on that planet.”

The path ahead: onward to the Martian crater rim

As scientifically intriguing as the samples have been so far, the mission expects many more discoveries to come.

“Our samples are already an incredibly scientifically compelling collection, but the crater rim promises to provide even more samples that will have significant implications for our understanding of Martian geologic history,” said Eleni Ravanis, a University of Hawaiì at Mānoa scientist on Perseverance’s Mastcam-Z instrument team.

“This is because we expect to investigate rocks from the most ancient crust of Mars. These rocks formed from a wealth of different processes, and some represent potentially habitable ancient environments that have never been examined up close before.”

The journey, however, holds its challenges. To reach the crater’s rim, Perseverance will rely on its auto-navigation capabilities, encountering slopes of up to 23 degrees.

By the time it summits at a location dubbed “Aurora Park,” the rover will have gained about 1,000 feet (300 meters) in elevation.

The main goal

One of the primary objectives of Perseverance’s mission is astrobiology, which involves caching samples that may contain signs of ancient microbial life.

The rover will also characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, all of which will pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, marking the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith.

NASA’s Mars Sample Return Program, in cooperation with the European Space Agency (ESA), aims to send a spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples and return them to Earth for comprehensive analysis.

The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that aim to prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.

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