![]() ![]() Perseverance location as of early February 2023.Perseverance arrives at the delta front.OF ARIZONA HIRISE DATASET: FERGASON ET AL 2020 OF ARIZONA HIRISE DATASET: FERGASON ET AL 2020 HRSC: ESA, DLR, FU-BERLIN, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO CTX: JPL-CALTECH/NASA, MSSS HIRISE: JPL-CALTECH/NASA, UNIV. Percy’s journey HRSC: ESA, DLR, FU-BERLIN, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO CTX: JPL-CALTECH/NASA, MSSS HIRISE: JPL-CALTECH/NASA, UNIV. Next, it’s headed to the top of the delta. ![]() The rover explored the delta front through December, before carefully depositing samples on the surface. Percy then journeyed to the delta, arriving in April 2022. It’s also collecting samples to return to Earth.Īfter landing on the Red Planet, Perseverance tested its movements and instruments for several months before exploring the floor of the Jezero crater. Drilling, scraping and collecting pieces of the Red Planet, the rover is using its seven science instruments to analyze the bits for any hint of ancient life. Jezero was picked for the Mars 2020 mission because it appears from orbit to be a former lake environment where microbes could have thrived, and its large delta would likely preserve any signs of them. While the earlier rovers focused on Martian geology and understanding the planet’s environment, Percy is looking for signs of past life. The most complex spacecraft to explore the Martian surface, Percy builds on the work of the Curiosity rover, which has been on Mars since 2012, the twin Spirit and Opportunity rovers, the Sojourner rover and other landers.īut Perseverance’s main purpose is different. Nicknamed Percy, the rover arrived at the Jezero crater two years ago, on February 18, 2021, with its sidekick helicopter, Ingenuity. It was not made up of the layers of clay and silt that would be found at a former lake bed. The visible shapes along with the chemical compositions showed that this rock, dubbed Rochette, was volcanic in origin. Then the scientists watched on a video conference as the rover’s two spectrometers revealed the chemistry of those meshed textures.
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