Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. News

Perseverance rover begins exploration of ancient river delta on Mars

Georgina Torbet
By

The Perseverance rover has begun exploring one of the most exciting areas of Mars: The delta in the Jezero crater. The rover’s Delta Front Campaign began on April 18, searching the site of an ancient river delta where it can learn more about the history of water on Mars and could even find evidence of ancient microbial life if it ever existed there.

“We’ve been eyeing the delta from a distance for more than a year while we explored the crater floor,” said Ken Farley, Perseverance project scientist from Caltech, as the rover was approaching the delta. “At the end of our fast traverse, we are finally able to get close to it, obtaining images of ever-greater detail revealing where we can best explore these important rocks.”

Related Videos
Perseverance looks towards the Delta on Sol 419, capturing this image with its Right Navigation Camera.
Perseverance looks towards the Delta on Sol 419, capturing this image with its Right Navigation Camera. NASA/JPL-Caltech

After driving at top speed to reach the delta from its previous location on the crater floor, the rover can now begin its twin aims of taking science readings of the area and also drilling and collecting samples for retrieval and return to Earth by future missions.

Related

“Perseverance will rove 130 feet (40 meters) up and over the delta, drill cores along the way, and characterize the layered sedimentary rocks that make up the delta,” Denise Buckner, a Student Collaborator on Perseverance at the University of Florida explained. “These sediments were deposited billions of years ago, when water flowed across the surface of Mars and a river drained into the ancient crater below. If Mars did host life during this time, remnants or signatures of those organisms could be preserved in some of these ancient rocks.”

This part of the rover’s mission is set to last around six months, and looking at the sedimentary layers will help researchers to understand the geological history of this particular region. In addition, when the river flowed on the surface of Mars billions of years ago, it carried with it rocks from all over the region, so collecting samples from here is like being able to look at samples from a much wider area.

Perseverance is currently heading through an area called Cannery Passage which runs between the crater floor and the delta, and the team on the ground will be analyzing images and other data to decide which path the rover should take next as it moves up the delta itself.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Perseverance Mars rover shares detailed panorama of sample depot
The site of Perseverance's sample depot.

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has been busy creating what the space agency recently said was “humanity’s first sample depot on another planet.”

The depot, which is essentially a flat patch of land, contains 10 titanium tubes holding samples of martian rock and dust collected by NASA’s rover in the two years since it landed on the red planet.

Read more
Mars Curiosity rover finds evidence of water where it was expected to be dry
Curiosity Rover

The key to understanding whether Mars was ever habitable is water. For life as we know it to thrive, liquid water needs to be present -- and we know that even though it is now dry, there was once liquid water on the surface of Mars. However, the history of water on Mars is complex, and scientists are still debating exactly how long water was present there and when the planet dried up.

And it's about to get more complex. Recently, the Curiosity rover has made an intriguing discovery suggesting that water was once present in an area that scientists had thought would be dry.

Read more
Ingenuity helicopter helps researchers learn about dust on Mars
The Ingenuity helicopter is pictured on the surface of Mars.

One of the big challenges of Mars exploration is something very small: dust. Fine dust covers much of the martian surface, and high winds and low gravity mean the dust is easily whipped up off the surface, covering solar panels and gumming up components. The Ingenuity helicopter has had its own problems with dust on its solar panels, limiting the amount of power it could draw from the sun.

Now, researchers have used data from Ingenuity to understand more about how dust moves in the martian air, learning about the dynamics of dust, which could help future missions deal with this ongoing problem.

Read more