the rover NASA Perseverance landed in a crater on Mars called Jezero after seven months of space flight and seven minutes of terror almost four years ago, on February 18, 2021. It has now scaled the crater rim and is ready to explore areas that could harbor clues to past life.
The one-ton robot (which on Mars weighs 400 kg) has been climbing the western edge of the Jezero crater for three months. Not without difficultiesPerseverance has finally reached the top and has sent NASA images of the slope that it has cost so much work to climb. The 20% inclination has not been the problem, but the loose and slippery terrain that forced the mission engineers to try various strategies to climb to the top.
After traveling 30 km along the Jezero bed, where a river once flowed, crowning the 500 meter high wall of the crater was a necessary step to continue exploring areas of scientific interest. The six-wheeled, car-sized rover, which is at a location called Lookout Hill (for its panoramic views), is now headed to a region of Mars unlike any other place it has investigated before.
Perseverance’s new scientific campaign is called Northern Rim and represents a change of third. Over the next few months, the robot will analyze completely new geology: from rocks that partially filled Jezero Crater when it was formed by a violent impact 3.9 billion years ago to rocks from the depths of Mars that shot upward, forming the rim of the crater. crater after impact.
“These rocks represent fragments of the early Martian crust and are among the oldest rocks found anywhere in the solar system,” explained Ken Farley, Mars 2020 mission scientist at Caltech.. “Investigating them could help us understand what Mars and our own planet were like in the beginning.”
Perseverance’s next stop will be Witch Hazel Hilla 100-meter hill in which each geological layer is “like a page in the book of Martian history,” according to Farley. As the rover descends the hill, its analyzes of the rocks will go back in time.
Then you will travel three kilometers to an area called Lac de Charmes, little modified by the formation of Jezero. Next, it will return to the crater rim to study a ledge with blocks of rock that could be fragmented remains of the Martian crust.
These areas are of special interest to NASA scientists because could confirm that Mars had habitable conditions and may have once harbored microbial life forms. Not long ago, Perseverance explored an area called Bright Angel where it took samples of a rock nicknamed “Cheyava Falls”. Their strange structures could be signatures of microbial life that inhabited the area when there were streams of water flowing through the crater.
Image | The route of the Perseverance rover and its location next to that of the Ingenuity helicopter (NASA/JPL-Caltech)