After 3½ years exploring Jezero Crater’s floor and river delta, NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover will ascend to an area where it will search for more discoveries that could rewrite Mars’ history.
NASA’s Perseverance rover is embarking on a challenging ascent of Jezero Crater’s western rim, entering its fifth science campaign to explore key regions like Pico Turquino and Witch Hazel Hill, where signs of ancient hydrothermal activity and varied climates may be found. The mission aims to collect and eventually return Martian rock samples to Earth, advancing our understanding of Mars’ geology, climate, and potential for ancient life.
New Science Campaign on Mars
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover will soon begin a monthslong ascent up the western rim of Jezero Crater that is likely to include some of the steepest and most challenging terrain the rover has encountered to date. Scheduled to start the week of August 19, the climb will mark the kickoff of the mission’s new science campaign — its fifth since the rover landed in the crater on February 18, 2021.
“Perseverance has completed four science campaigns, collected 22 rock cores, and traveled over 18 unpaved miles,” said Perseverance project manager Art Thompson of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory 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.”
Exploring Ancient Martian Terrain
Two of the priority regions the science team wants to study at the top of the crater are nicknamed “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.
Unveiling Martian Sedimentary Secrets
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.
A study published on August 14, in the scientific journal AGU Advances, chronicles the 10 rock cores gathered from sedimentary rocks in an ancient Martian delta, a fan-shaped collection of rocks and sediment that formed billions of years ago at the convergence of a river and a crater lake.
The core samples collected at the fan front are the oldest, whereas the rocks cored at the fan top are likely the youngest, produced when flowing water deposited sediment in the western fan.
“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.”
Anticipated Discoveries at 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 and one of the Crater Rim Campaign science leads. “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.”
Navigating Steep Martian Terrain
Reaching the top of the crater won’t be easy. To get there, Perseverance will rely on its auto-navigation capabilities as it follows a route that rover planners designed to minimize hazards while still giving the science team plenty to investigate. Encountering slopes of up to 23 degrees on the journey (rover drivers avoid terrain that would tilt Perseverance more than 30 degrees), the rover will have gained about 1,000 feet (300 meters) in elevation by the time it summits the crater’s rim at a location the science team has dubbed “Aurora Park.”
Then, perched hundreds of meters above a crater floor stretching 28 miles (45 kilometers) across, Perseverance can begin the next leg of its adventure.
Reference: “Astrobiological Potential of Rocks Acquired by the Perseverance Rover at a Sedimentary Fan Front in Jezero Crater, Mars” by T. Bosak, D. L. Shuster, E. L. Scheller, S. Siljeström, M. J. Zawaski, L. Mandon, J. I. Simon, B. P. Weiss, K. M. Stack, E. N. Mansbach, A. H. Treiman, K. C. Benison, A. J. Brown, A. D. Czaja, K. A. Farley, E. M. Hausrath, K. Hickman-Lewis, C. D. K. Herd, J. R. Johnson, L. E. Mayhew, M. E. Minitti, K. H. Williford, B. V. Wogsland, M.-P. Zorzano, A. C. Allwood, H. E. F. Amundsen, J. F. Bell, K. Benzerara, S. Bernard, O. Beyssac, D. K. Buckner, M. Cable, F. Calef, G. Caravaca, D. C. Catling, E. Clavé, E. Cloutis, B. A. Cohen, A. Cousin, E. Dehouck, A. G. Fairén, D. T. Flannery, T. Fornaro, O. Forni, T. Fouchet, E. Gibbons, F. Gomez Gomez, S. Gupta, K. P. Hand, J. A. Hurowitz, H. Kalucha, D. A. K. Pedersen, G. Lopes-Reyes, J. N. Maki, S. Maurice, J. I. Nuñez, N. Randazzo, J. W. Rice, C. Royer, M. A. Sephton, S. Sharma, A. Steele, C. D. Tate, K. Uckert, A. Udry, R. C. Wiens and A. Williams, 14 August 2024, AGU Advances.
DOI: 10.1029/2024AV001241
NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover
Launched by NASA in July 2020, the Perseverance rover landed on Mars in the Jezero Crater in February 2021 with a clear mission: search for signs of ancient life and collect samples for eventual return to Earth. This site was chosen because it was believed to once have been flooded with water and was likely a habitable environment in the ancient past. Perseverance carries a suite of scientific instruments designed to analyze the Martian geology and atmosphere, including a ground-penetrating radar, a weather station, and the first Martian oxygen production experiment.
As it explores, Perseverance is also paving the way for future human missions to Mars through technology demonstrations like the MOXIE experiment, which successfully generated oxygen from the Martian atmosphere. The rover’s findings will help NASA better understand the challenges posed by the Martian environment, informing plans for crewed missions in the coming decades.
