Here is the sequel to NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover

The Perseverance rover prepares to pierce Martian rocks, and mission scientists have seen evidence of ancient flash floods in the dry lake bed where the rover landed. NASA shared theI know updates and more at a press conference today at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Perseverance landed on Mars in Februaryarea, and his scientific mission officially started in june, following operational checks of its instruments and historical flights taken by the Ingenuity helicopter. Perseverance is tasked with exploring the Jezero de Mars crater, the site of an ancient lake that NASA scientists hope they can contain fossilized evidence of Martian life. So far, Perseverance has covered approximately one kilometer (00.62 miles), picture interesting rock formations along the way. These formations shed light on the geological history of the Red Planet, and some of them are promising sites to study for biosignatures (proof of life), which researchers believe could looks like stromatolites locked in ancient rock on Earth. Ultimately, the rock samples collected by the rover will be recovered by another mission and brought to Earth, the first materials that will be be picked up on Mars.

Perseverance has led by the Martian Seïtah, a dangerous stretch of sand dunes that the rover could easily get stuck. Olivier Toupet, leader of the rover’s improved navigation team, said a major improvement in the rover’s artificial intelligence system has allowed the rover to think about its next destination as it rolls, a big step forward beyond stop-and-go navigation. previous rovers.

All the while, Perseverance has been conducting technology demonstrations that will inform future missions. Another demonstration besides ingenuity was MOXIE, in which perseverance generated a small amount of oxygen on the Martian surface, which a huge implications for human ambitions beyond Earth. “This experience feeds these future missions where we would like to extract oxygen, that we would like to use so that human astronauts can breathe and even launch vehicles, ”Jennifer Trosper, Perseverance project manager, told today’s conference. press conference.

The rover’s final destination is called Three Forks, which marks a dry river delta that starts from Jezero. On his way, he will visit several points of interest, including the Crater Floor Fractured Rough, the first sampling site. NASA does not know if the fractured crude is igneous or sedimentary, which will inform scientists about the Jezero formation and what clues about life it might contain. Persistent scientists expect the lake bed to hold back some of the oldest rocks that the rover will have the chance to look at before heads to the river delta.

“One of the hypotheses we’re trying to test is that the lake that once filled Jezero wasn’t there just once, but went through several episodes of filling, draining and re-filling.” , said Ken Farley. , scientist of the Perseverance project at Caltech, during the press conference. “This is very important because it means that we will have several periods during which we could possibly learn more about the environmental conditions on Mars, and we will have several periods where we could search for ancient life that could have existed on the planet. ”

Farley said images taken by Perseverance indicated that the ancient Jezero Lake had different water levels at different times, and that scientists saw evidence that the old flash floods were moving rocks across the delta. One of the mission’s biggest points of interest so far is a rock outcrop south of the landing site of the rover dubbed Artuby, after a river in southern France. The Artuby appears to be fossilized Martian mud, exactly the kind of stagnant and unfazed mmaterial from the old lake that NASA wants to investigate.

For sampling, the rover will first abrade the rock surface to rid it of any concealing element, such as Martian dust. Next, the rover will extract a core of rock and seal it in a sample tube inside the rover’s belly. This tube will eventually be included in a sample cache which, if all goes well over the next decade, will be brought back to Earth by another spacecraft.

“Much of what we’ve been doing recently both on Earth and on the vehicle is getting ready for this first sample,” Trosper said. “We are ready to sample … we plan to get this first sample in the first weeks of August.”

Although Perseverance has not yet sampled any rocks, it has processed one of his five control tubes. Control tubes are very similar to sample tubes, but they contain with materials that detect contaminants. Witness tubes are opened and sealed to sample the local Martian environment before extracting a rock, so that when all the tubes are returned to Earth, NASA scientists are going know if Terrestrials contamination was present when the samples were taken. There are 38 other tubes for taking samples — that’s 38 opportunities for us Earthlings to see what Mars is made of, how the planet has changed, and what, if anything, once lived there.

All in all, Perseverance’s next project is ambitious as hell. Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for science at NASA, said samples should arrive on Earth in the early 2030s.

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