NASA’s Perseverance Rover Collects Vital Samples on 1,000th Martian Day
Marking its 1,000th Martian day on the Red Planet, NASA’s Perseverance rover has completed its exploration of the ancient river delta in Jezero Crater, uncovering vital evidence of a past lake and conditions potentially suitable for life. The rover has collected 23 samples along its journey, shedding light on Mars’ geological history and the search for ancient life.
The vital discoveries were shared at the American Geophysical Union fall meeting in San Francisco on Tuesday, revealing the wealth of information collected from the Martian surface. Among the key discoveries is a sample called “Lefroy Bay,” which contains a large quantity of fine-grained silica, a material known to preserve ancient fossils on Earth. Another sample, called “Otis Peak,” holds a significant amount of phosphate, often associated with life as we know it.
“We picked Jezero Crater as a landing site because orbital imagery showed a delta – clear evidence that a large lake once filled the crater. A lake is a potentially habitable environment, and delta rocks are a great environment for entombing signs of ancient life as fossils in the geologic record,” said Perseverance’s project scientist, Ken Farley of Caltech.
Jezero Crater was formed from an asteroid impact almost 4 billion years ago. After Perseverance landed in February 2021, the mission team discovered the crater floor is made of igneous rock formed from magma underground or from volcanic activity at the surface. They have since found sandstone and mudstone, signaling the arrival of the first river in the crater hundreds of millions of years later. The team thinks the lake eventually grew as wide as 22 miles (35 kilometers) in diameter and as deep as 100 feet (30 meters).
The samples Perseverance gathers are about as big as a piece of classroom chalk and are stored in special metal tubes as part of the Mars Sample Return campaign, a joint effort by NASA and the European Space Agency. Bringing the tubes to Earth would enable scientists to study the samples with powerful lab equipment too large to take to Mars.
Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith.
The discoveries from Perseverance’s exploration of Jezero Crater continue to propel the understanding of Mars’ geological history and provide valuable insight into the potential for past life on the Red Planet.