NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars has seen its future, and it’s filled with rocks. Tons and plenty of rocks. After spending the summer season trundling by way of Jezero Crater and trying out the sights, it’s now time for Percy to get to work, teasing out the geologic historical past of its new residence and in search of out indicators of historic microbial life.
“We’ve really been on a street journey,” undertaking supervisor Jennifer Trosper, who relies at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., stated at a July 21 information convention. “And through it, we’ll take our very first pattern from the floor of Mars.”
Percy is about 1 kilometer south of the place it landed on February 18 (SN: 2/17/21). After driving itself round a area of sand dunes, accompanied by its tagalong helicopter Ingenuity (SN: 4/30/21), the robotic explorer has pulled as much as its first sampling spot: a backyard of flat, pale stones dubbed paver stones. “That is the realm the place we’re actually going to be digging in, each figuratively and actually, to grasp the rocks that we’ve got been on for the final a number of months,” stated Kenneth Farley, Perseverance undertaking scientist at Caltech.
The workforce has been making an attempt to determine whether or not these rocks are volcanic or sedimentary. “We nonetheless don’t have the reply,” Farley stated. Photos taken a couple of centimeters above the floor present what the workforce is up towards: The rocks are plagued by mud and pebbles, most likely blown in from elsewhere, and the smoother surfaces have a mysterious purplish coating. “All of those components conspire to stop us from peering into the rock and truly seeing what it’s made out of,” he stated.
Within the coming weeks, Percy will bore a easy cavity in a kind of rocks and get under the floor crud. Devices on its robotic arm will then transfer in shut to supply detailed chemical and mineralogical maps that may reveal the rocks’ true nature. Then, someday in mid-August, the workforce will extract its first pattern. That pattern will go right into a tube that may ultimately get dropped off — together with samples from different locales — for some future mission to select up and produce to Earth (SN: 7/28/20).
Cameras scouting farther afield have turned up future sampling websites. A small far-off hill exhibits hints of finely layered rock that could be mud deposits. “That is precisely the sort of rock that we’re most fascinated about investigating for in search of potential biosignatures,” Farley stated.
And the best way that rocks are strewn about an historic river delta within the distance means that the lake that after crammed Jezero Crater went by way of a number of episodes of filling in and drying up. If true, Farley stated, then the crater could have preserved “a number of time durations after we would possibly be capable to search for proof of historic life which may have existed on the planet.”
