After a year exploring the floor of Mars’s Jezero crater, where it gathered seven—soon to be eight—chalk-size rock samples for return to Earth, NASA’s Perseverance rover is set to speed toward its longstanding target at the crater’s edge.
After a year exploring the floor of Mars’s Jezero crater, where it gathered seven—soon to be eight—chalk-size rock samples for return to Earth, NASA’s Perseverance rover is set to speed toward its longstanding target at the crater’s edge: the remnants of a delta, deposited by water billions of years ago, that may contain fossilized evidence for past life.
That’s a welcome finding, as dates gleaned from the volcanic rocks could reveal when the later flood of water filled the crater. And it doesn’t dim hopes for finding ancient life in the crater. Even if the rocks weren’t deposited by water, the team is finding that they interacted with it, creating a decent home for life.
During most of its drive, Perseverance has stuck to Máaz, because Séítah is covered with impassable sand dunes. Halfway through its tour, though, the rover ducked into Séítah between dunes, guided by the reconnaissance of the Ingenuity helicopter, to drill several samples.
Despite their volcanic origin, the crater floor rocks show signs of modest alteration by water, and some could have provided a happy home for past microbial life, according to work presented at LPSC by Eva Scheller, a geologist at the California Institute of Technology.
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