Perseverance will soon head up on to the rim of Jezero Crater. Image: NASA/JPL-CALTECH/MSSS
The 1,000-day anniversary of NASA’s Mars rover.
The Perseverance rover, which touched down on Mars in February 2021, has virtually finished the mission assigned to it, according to Nasa.
The primary objective of the robot was to gather rocks that could be used to uncover signs of former life while also surveying an old crater lake.
The mission group informed a big meeting in San Francisco that this main goal had been achieved.
The 1,000th Martian day of the mission was the day the announcement was made.
“It’s a pretty incredible achievement and we’ve done an amazing amount of science,” stated Dr. Lori Glaze, head of planetary science at Nasa.
Rest assured, Perseverance has no plans to “switch off the engine” just yet.
There are many obstacles to overcome, the most pressing of which is figuring out how to return the rock samples collected by the vehicle to Earth for laboratory analysis.
The technical solutions, timeline, and budget are presently under consideration by a board that will not deliver its report until early next year. Nasa and the European Space Agency will work together on this project.
Inevitably, a rocket would have to be dispatched to Mars and loaded with the finger-sized samples before being launched into orbit for the return trip.
“It will be one of the most audacious robotic missions ever conducted,” Dr. Mini Wadhwa of Arizona State University, who is the senior scientist on Nasa’s Mars Sample Return programme, said.
She went on to say that it was an essential effort.
The high standard of the samples taken provides evidence of this.
Perseverance has taken thirteen rock cores, each with its own unique chemical composition, and stored them in its belly.
What occurred in Mars’s Jezero Crater between 3.7 and 3.5 billion years ago is detailed in them.
At one point in time, a river channel entered the 45-kilometer-wide basin, causing a delta to form from the accumulated silt and sand.
This geological formation may have preserved evidence of microbes from the distant past.
Recent rover activities have focused on a high-priority group of sediments at Jezero’s edge that show signs of carbonate mineralization. Iron phosphate has also been found by perseverance.
According to Dr. Morgan Cable, this was particularly noteworthy since it indicated that the crater had phosphorous, an element crucial to Earth biology, in a form that might be utilized by Martian organisms, presuming such beings ever existed.
Phosphorus is an essential component of the DNA backbones, cell membranes, and the vital energy currency ATP (adenosine triphosphate), according to a research specialist from Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who spoke to reporters.
“We know that phosphorus is incredibly important, and now we have the strongest evidence ever collected that phosphorus was available in a form that life could access if it was there.”
Soon, Perseverance will embark on a journey that will lead it to the inner rim of the crater and beyond.
It will be able to study rocks that are hundreds of millions of years older than the ones it has examined so far because of this.
“There’s a completely different kind of potentially habitable environment in the subsurface, where groundwater interacts with rocks.
There’s reason to believe that we will explore rocks of that type as we climb up the rim, and then as we move out into the area just beyond the rim,” said Dr. Ken Farley, a researcher from the California Institute of Technology who serves as the Perseverance project scientist.
Attendees of the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting heard updates from the Perseverance rover mission team.