Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

Mars rover Perseverance is heading for the Jezero delta

Georgina Torbet
By

Having recently passed the one-year mark in exploring Mars’s Jezero Crater, the Perseverance rover will soon be packing up and heading off to a new and exciting location: The Jezero delta. As the site of an ancient river delta, this area is one of the most promising locations to search for evidence of ancient life, as it was once an area of warm, shallow water that would be the ideal conditions for the emergence of life.

Until now, the Perseverance rover has been exploring the floor of the Jezero crater and collecting rock samples which will be brought back to Earth for analysis by future missions. Now, the rover will perform a week of analysis before grabbing a sample of a type of rock called Ch’ał which hasn’t been sampled so far. With that sample collected, Perseverance will then be heading to the delta to learn more about the history of water in the region.

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover used its Left Navigation Camera of target Sid, a higher standing boulder seen just above the rover’s arm.
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover used its Left Navigation Camera (Navcam) to acquire an image on Feb 24, 2022 (sol 361) of target Sid, a higher standing boulder seen here just above the rover’s arm. Scientists plan to sample this rock before the rover heads to the delta for the mission’s next science campaign. NASA/JPL-

“Once we have our samples in stow, Perseverance will be kicking it into high gear around the northern tip of Séítah and west towards the delta,” Perseverance team member Brad Garczynski wrote in a blog post. “There we will have the opportunity to investigate sedimentary rock layers, clay minerals, and rounded boulders washed down from far beyond Jezero. These features are vestiges of Jezero’s watery past and clear indicators of an ancient habitable environment. If microbial life did exist here in the past, this is one of the best places to look for it as finely layered muds may have buried and preserved a record of that microbial activity.”

In addition to investigating these new features, researchers are preparing to plan Perseverance’s route using previously collected data from the rover’s Mastcam-Z and SuperCam instruments, as well as data collected by orbital explorers to look for the ideal exploration route. Plus, Perseverance will soon have the Ingenuity helicopter nearby to help plan out its route as well.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Rebooted Mars Express instrument peers inside martian moon Phobos
Mars Express HRSC image of Phobos, taken on 7 March 2010.
Enormous meteor strike blows 500 foot-wide crater into Martian surface
Illustration of an impact causing surface waves to spread across Mars.
Perseverance rover to drop off samples for return to Earth
This annotated image from NASA’s Perseverance shows the location of the first sample depot – where the Mars rover will deposit a group of sample tubes for possible future return to Earth – in an area of Jezero Crater called Three Forks. The image was taken Aug. 29, 2022.
How NASA is building an instrument to withstand the brutal conditions of Venus
An artists concept of DAVINCI+ on its way to Venus's surface.
NASA sticks with Artemis I launch despite minor damage from Hurricane Nicole
NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket with the Orion spacecraft aboard is seen atop the mobile launcher at Launch Pad 39B, Friday, Nov. 11, 2022, at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Teams began walkdowns and inspections at the pad to assess the status of the rocket and spacecraft after the passage of Hurricane Nicole.
NASA launches weather satellite and inflatable heat shield test
A United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket carrying the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS)-2 civilian polar-orbiting weather satellite for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA's Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator (LOFTID) tech demo lifts off from Space Launch Complex-3 at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 1:49 a.m. PST (4:49 a.m. EST) Nov. 10, 2022.
See the dark pillar of the Cone Nebula captured by the Very Large Telescope
The Cone Nebula is part of a star-forming region of space, NGC 2264, about 2500 light-years away. Its pillar-like appearance is a perfect example of the shapes that can develop in giant clouds of cold molecular gas and dust, known for creating new stars. This dramatic new view of the nebula was captured with the FOcal Reducer and low dispersion Spectrograph 2 (FORS2) instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), and released on the occasion of ESO’s 60th anniversary.
Mars Express orbiter has relayed data from seven different Mars missions
An artist's impression of Mars Express. The spacecraft left Earth for Mars on 2 June 2003. It reached its destination after a six-month journey, and has been investigating the planet since early 2004.
James Webb’s MIRI instrument is back to full operations
The James Webb Space Telescope.
Hubble captures rare image of a supernova as it happens
As a result of a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, three different moments in a far-off supernova explosion were captured in a single snapshot by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The light from the supernova, which was located behind the galaxy cluster Abell 370, was multiply lensed by the cluster’s immense gravity. This light took three different paths through the cosmic lens of the massive cluster. The three paths were three different lengths, so when the light arrived at Hubble (on the same day in December 2010), the supernova appeared at three different stages of evolution.
Super-sensitive exoplanet-hunting instrument captures its first light data
James Chong, infrastructure technician at Keck Observatory, assisting with the delicate lift of the Zerodur optics bench into the observatory basement where the instrument resides.
How to watch the first NASA spacewalk in eight months
A NASA spacewalk
NASA’s CAPSTONE arrival brings lunar space station a step closer
Artist's illustration of CAPSTONE approaching the moon.