Tag: Perseverance

NASA’s Perseverance Rover Captures Stunning View of Big Mars Crater

SPACE reports, “NASA’s Perseverance rover took a break from its Mars mountaineering expedition recently to survey its old stomping grounds. The car-sized Perseverance landed on the floor of the 28-mile-wide (45-kilometer-wide) Jezero Crater in February 2021 to hunt for signs of past Mars life and collect dozens of samples for future return to Earth.
Full Story (SPACE)

Perseverance Rover Finds Mysterious Boulder “Never Observed Before” on Mars

CBS News reports, “While exploring a crater on Mars that may give scientists insights into life that potentially once existed there, NASA said its Perseverance rover made an unprecedented discovery. The rover, which landed on the Red Planet in 2021 specifically to probe the ancient Jezero crater, found a mysterious light-toned boulder earlier this month that was the first of its kind seen on Martian land.”
Full Story (CBS News)

Perseverance Rover Completes Sample Depot on Mars

CNET News reports that NASA’s Perseverance rover has created “the first sample depot on another world. NASA JPL announced Saturday that the rover has successfully placed 10 tubes on the Martian ground in a specific pattern that would allow a future mission to come fetch them if needed.” The rover’s efforts “have been in service of a big idea: getting pieces of Mars back to Earth for close study by scientists. Researchers hope they might tell the story of whether the red planet was once home to microbial life. The sample depot is an important part of the upcoming Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission to bring Martian rocks to Earth in the 2030s.” NASA called completion of the depot “a major milestone that involved precision planning and navigation to make sure the tubes could be collected by two helicopters from the MSR mission.”
Full Story (CNET News)

Perseverance Rover Captures First-Ever Sound of Mars “Dust Devil”

The Washington Post reports that scientists have recorded the sound of a “dust devil” as it made “a direct hit” on NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover, “peppering the spacecraft with dust and whispering into a microphone that the team had smartly included in their package of instruments. The trove of data coming from the encounter has thrilled scientists, who are keenly aware of the outsize influence Martian dust has on the planet’s climate.”
Full Story (Washington Post)

Mars Rover Collects Samples which Indicate Possible Life on Mars

The Washington Post reported that NASA rover Perseverance “has hit what scientists are hoping is pay dirt.” Martian rocks excavated “by the rover show signs of a watery past and are loaded with the kind of organic molecules that are the foundation for life as we know it.” Scientists collaborating on the mission “also say the rock samples, which the rover has cached in tubes for a future return to Earth, have the right chemical recipe to preserve evidence of ancient Martian life, if it ever existed.” The new Perseverance research “is detailed in three extensive studies published Wednesday, one in the journal Science and two in the journal Science Advances.”
Aviation Today (Washington Post)

Perseverance Explores Jezero River Delta on Mars

CNET News reports that NASA’s Perseverance rover has arrived at the Jezero Crater river delta on Mars. NASA Science Mission Directorate Associate Administrator Thomas Zurbuchen said Tuesday, “The delta at Jezero Crater promises to be a veritable geologic feast and one of the best locations on Mars to look for signs of past microscopic life.”
Full Story (CNET News)

Perseverance Collects Seventh Mars Rock Sample

SPACE reports that NASA’s Perseverance rover “drilled into another Martian rock and socked away the resulting core, mission team members announced via Twitter” Tuesday. The sample is the seventh collected by Perseverance on Mars thus far. Perseverance is to collect another rock sample from the Jezero Crater before heading on to the Jezero river delta.
Full Story (SPACE)