![]() ![]() The rover will explore the dried remains of the crater's larger delta, which is cradled in Jezero's western edge. The water slowed as it poured into the basin, causing suspended sand and mud to settle to the lake bottom and form a pair of deltas, which fanned out around the branching waterways. Winding rivers spilled over the crater rim, feeding what became an ancient lake. A later impact sculpted the inner rocky bowl now known as Jezero. The planetary pockmark is perched on the western edge of the Isidis Basin-a sprawling crater about 750 miles wide blasted out by a huge space rock some 3.9 billion years ago. "As we explore different parts of the crater inside Jezero, we have the potential to kind of step through time," says Kathryn Stack Morgan, a deputy project scientist at NASA's JPL. Jezero's rocks offer a chance to study this dramatic transformation, capturing the key slice of time during which the great drying took place. By three billion years ago, the planet was parched, and Mars became the red dustball we see today.Įxactly why and how this happened remains unknown. But at some point the atmosphere thinned, and Mars's climate took a dramatic turn. Scientists believe Mars was once blanketed in a thick atmosphere, which helped trap enough heat to keep water from freezing and produced enough pressure to stop the liquid from evaporating and escaping as gas. ![]() "We are going to learn things that we never could have imagined." Jezero's geologic intrigue ![]() "We are going to be surprised," says Nina Lanza, a planetary scientist and team lead for Space and Planetary Exploration at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The science team will explore this region with the rover’s advanced suite of instruments, selecting samples from the crater floor up through an ancient river delta and beyond. ![]() Though the ground under the rover's six wheels is now parched, the ruddy rocks and sand hold clues to a past flush with water. Perseverance touched down near the crater's rim in February 2021 after a harrowing, seven-minute plunge through Mars's thin atmosphere. The stage for this dramatic search is Jezero Crater, a 28-mile-wide basin carved by a meteorite impact billions of years ago. In addition to sampling, Perseverance is equipped to sniff, taste, and peer at the Martian landscape in greater detail than ever before, helping scientists unwind the planet's watery past and seek out hints of Martian microbes that may have once thrived in now-vanished rivers and lakes. "What we're doing right now is going to impact Mars science for a long time." "It feels kind of surreal," says Vivian Sun of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), who co-leads the mission's first science campaign. The rover will ultimately deposit its cache on Mars's surface, and a future mission will scoop it up and transport the rocks to eager earthbound scientists. This sample is only the first of dozens to be collected in the coming months. An extra day of analysis revealed the prize had simply slipped deeper inside the tube, which Perseverance then safely capped and stowed in its belly. While early images showed the tan, speckled rock nestled within its tube, the sample vanished from sight after the rover shook the tube to clear any dust. The process wasn’t without its hiccups, though. ![]()
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