The endurance rightover is approaching its one-year anniversary since landing on February 2nd. March 18, 2021—that is, a March year.
NASA’s newest rover has wandered several miles around the red planet’s Jezero Crater in search of signs of, and evidence of, ancient life march‘ past. The rover, part of NASA’s ambitious Mars 2020 mission, has gathered a vast amount of information about the Martian surface and its rocks, and today the team behind the Endurance Rover published three new research papers detailing their findings to date.
The data reveals a “tale of fire and water” in the history of Mars Briony Horgana planetary scientist at Purdue University in Indiana and co-author of one of the new studies.
Related: 12 amazing photos from the Perseverance rover’s first year on Mars
Perseverance is NASA’s most advanced rover to date, and can study Martian rocks in more detail than any of its predecessors. Its suite of instruments includes Mastcam-Z, the rover’s “eyes” that allow it to study rocks from a distance, and SHERLOC and PIXL, two technical devices that perform X-ray and UV spectroscopy, which analyze in detail the composition of rocks and minerals.
“These papers demonstrate the capability of the Mars 2020 payload,” Horgan told Space.com. “By studying the geology of Jezero Crater from outcrop [large] From scales with Mastcam-Z to individual grains with PIXL and SHERLOC, we were able to piece together the complex history of the crater floor.”
For decades, satellites have been like that Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have scoured the surface of Mars for interesting places to explore. The area around Perseverance’s landing site in Jezero Crater is of particular interest to astronomers, who suspect it was once a river delta that emptied into a lake contained in the crater itself.
Water has long been an interesting point on Mars mariners 9‘s first images of the water-carved canyon from Valles Marineris in the 1970s to direct evidence of water ice excavated by landers like Phoenix 2008 and beyond. Humans are naturally obsessed with water as it is such a vital ingredient to life – whether finding extraterrestrial life or supporting our own during human spaceflight. Although Mars is known to have had some water at some point, planetary scientists are still trying to figure out the details of the timeline and how much water flowed.
“By landing at Jezero, we’re examining rocks that are much older than at other previous landing sites, which helps us understand the earliest times in Martian history when we think they were most habitable,” Horgan said. “Our data confirms that there was water everywhere!”
The rover found a combination of iron-rich minerals normally found in volcanic rock, such as olivine and pyroxene, as well as versions of the minerals altered by water and brine, such as hematite. The chemistry of these minerals tells a story of flowing lava hitting water multiple times. The first time water flowed it was warm – and later the water was salty. This water could have taken the form of lakes or perhaps even groundwater flowing through the rocks.
“The results of these studies demonstrate the unique capabilities of the Perseverance rover,” agreed Schuyler Borges, a planetary scientist at Northern Arizona University who studies Mars analogues on Earth and is not a member of the Perseverance team. They’re particularly excited about the fact that water occurs multiple times in Mars’ past, since more water “means more opportunities for life to be involved, if it exists,” they told Space.com.
Persistence also brought two “bonus missions” to demonstrate new technologies: the MOXIE experiment to produce oxygen from the Martian atmosphere and the Resourceful helicopter. Although Ingenuity was originally only intended to prove that human technology could fly on another planet, it “turned out.” only a successful technology demonstration for a helpful scientific scouting companion of the rover from a bird’s eye view,” said Corrine Rojas, engineer at the Mastcam-Z camera at Arizona State University.
Data from the rover’s observations during the Ingenuity flights gave the team even more information about how dust moves from the surface of Mars — exciting “bonus science,” as Rojas called it, that these new studies mention.
This is just the beginning for Perseverance, and it is even preparing for the more distant future by storing rock samples as it traverses the surface of Mars. One day, NASA and its European counterpart plan to recover these samples and bring them back to Earth for further study.
“We’ve learned so much,” Horgan said of the mission so far. “But of course the big advances will come when we bring these samples home!”
The three (opens in new tab) New (opens in new tab) papers (opens in new tab) were published in the journals Science and Science Advances on Wednesday (Nov. 23).
Follow the author at @briles_34 on twitter. follow us on twitter @spacedotcom and further Facebook.
#NASAs #Perseverance #rover #opens #window #Mars #watery