Selfie of the Perseverance Rover from early 2023.
Traversing Mars on flat ground is hard enough. It’s sandy, dusty, rocky, windy and cold. NASA’s Perseverance rover will face all of these conditions, but this time on a climb to the rim of Jezero Crater. NASA announced the rover’s ambitious travel plans this week. The wheeled explorer will tackle inclines of up to 23 degrees and climb 300 meters in elevation during the journey.
Perseverance arrived at Jezero Crater in February 2021. It explored the site of an ancient lake and river delta inside the crater. Now it has its sights set on the crater’s western rim. “Perseverance has completed four science campaigns, collected 22 rock cores, and traveled over 18 dirt miles,” Perseverance project manager Art Thompson said in a statement on August 14. “As we begin the crater rim campaign, our rover is in excellent shape, and the team can’t wait to see what’s on top of this place.”
A map shows the route the Perseverance rover will take as it climbs to the western rim of Jezero. … (+)
The climb is scheduled to begin the week of August 19 and could take months. It will include “some of the steepest and most challenging terrain the rover has traversed to date,” NASA said. At the top, great scientific rewards could await. NASA is interested in an area nicknamed “Pico Turquino” with ancient fractures that may be linked to long-ago hydrothermal activity.
Another area of interest is nicknamed “Witch Hazel Hill.” Witch Hazel Hill has light-colored bedrock that resembles an extraordinary rock that Perseverance recently studied and sampled. The sample of rock, called “Cheyava Falls,” may contain evidence of ancient microbial life, but NASA says more studies are needed to understand the rover’s findings. Scientists would be thrilled to find more rocks that resemble Cheyava Falls.
Despite budget concerns, NASA hopes to one day launch a sample return mission to Mars. The goal of the mission would be to collect some rock samples from Perseverance and bring them back to Earth for detailed laboratory study. This may be necessary to get a definitive answer to one of our biggest questions about Mars: Was there once microbial life there? Astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient life, is a major goal of the Perseverance mission.
Perseverance took 59 images on August 4 to create this panorama of its view of the edge of the … (+)
Researchers are excited about the rover’s future discoveries on the crater rim. They expect to find rocks from the Red Planet’s ancient crust. “These rocks were formed by a variety of different processes, and some represent potentially habitable ancient environments that have never been studied up close before,” said Perseverance scientist Eleni Ravanis of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Ravanis is one of the science leaders of the Crater Rim Campaign.
Getting Perseverance safely to its destination will require a combination of human and robotic intelligence. Rover planners have chosen a route that avoids hazards. The rover will use its automatic navigation programs to make some of its own driving decisions. Although the route will be steep, NASA is trying to avoid gradients over 30 degrees. Perseverance will stop along the way to explore the view and conduct scientific studies. It will be a triumphant moment when it finally emerges from the crater rim. The view is expected to be breathtaking.
