The Perseverance rover is about to—as the kids say—lock in and turn its robotic treads onto some of the most challenging terrain yet.
The rover’s focus has shifted to Jezero Crater’s western rim, which show signs of ancient hydrothermal activity. The investigation of the area will be Perseverance’s fifth scientific campaign on the Red Planet so far.
Percy has been toiling on the Martian surface for the past 3.5 years. In its tenure, the rover has drilled into rocks, taken images of the Martian surface and the Mars helicopter Ingenuity, and compiled a collection of rock samples that will hopefully— someday—be brought to Earth for study.
The top priority of the Perseverance mission is to investigate whether there was once life on Mars. Billions of years ago, the Red Planet had rivers and lakes; now, the surface is arid, rocky, and liquid water is not known to exist on its surface. However, it once did, and liquid water is a prerequisite for life as we know it. (That’s not to say alien life cannot exist without water, but since Earth is the only place we know of that supports life, that’s the foundation for our best astrobiological guesses.)
A paper published earlier this month in AGU Advances describes the astrobiological potential of some of the rocks already collected by Perseverance. “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, in a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory release.
“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,” Bosak added.
In the upcoming science campaign, Perseverance will have to overcome slopes of up to 23 degrees and a climb of about 1,000 feet (300 meters) to summit the rim of Jezero, which billions of years ago contained a massive lake.
Its first stop on the trek will be Dox Castle, a rocky outcrop on the rover’s ascent route. From there, Perseverance will pass another region of interest (“Pico Turquino”) before arriving at Witch Hazel Hill, which contains layers of ancient material that date back to when Mars’ climate was much different than today, according to a JPL release.
Once it makes the climb, the Perseverance could be on the cusp of new insights into Mars’ ancient history—and what, if anything, once called the desolate planet home.
