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What is this thing?
Striking detail
NASA is embarking on its next exciting adventure on the Martian surface – and luckily for us, the agency is taking us for the ride.
Earlier this week, NASA released a stunning high-resolution panorama taken by Perseverance’s Mastcam-Z camera and then assembled by engineers at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California.
The image shows an incredible amount of detail. This allows you to have an unprecedented look at the surrounding Jezero Crater, an area of Mars that is believed to be a former dried up river delta. Suspected.
Harbor seal rock
Among the countless rocks, scientists have spotted a rather strange outcrop. A dark and unusually tall stone stands out against the rocky landscape. Thanks to its form similar to an aquatic mammal, the team previously dubbed it “Harbor Seal Rock,” according to Jim Bell, principal investigator of Mastcam-Z, who spoke on a webcast Thursday, as quoted by Space.com.
The rock probably formed over countless years of strong winds that hit the crater.
Staging
The panorama also showed an area near the rover where dust was blown away by Perseverance’s “celestial crane”, a rocket-powered descent stage the rover used to glide gently to the surface below on February 18.
Other areas like this were showing scarred rocks that scientists believe could be the result of volcanic activity – but investigations haven’t started yet, so they’re not quite ready to do so just yet. a guess.
Luckily, we’ll get a closer look at Perseverance’s environment soon. Once the rover switches to surface-optimized software, a four-day process that has already started, Perseverance will enable three times sharper panoramas.
READ MORE: ‘Harbor Seal Rock’ on Mars, other new sites puzzling Perseverance rover scientists [Space.com]
Learn more about perseverance: Scientists grow microbes on real rocks on Mars
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