What has Perseverance learned from 1000 days on Mars? #space
Posted By RichC on December 16, 2023
NASA’s Perseverance rover continues on its Mars exploration 
mission that I’ve followed from the start. The Twitter feed along with the geology exploration and rock sample collection is space science at its best. For those not following the mission as closely, a YahooNews/CNN story last week that summarized the 1000 days of “roving” and of Ingenuity flights (the rover’s helicopter companion) is a quick way to catch up (link to PDF saved version).
Martian rocks tell a story
Scientists believe that Jezero Crater formed when an asteroid slammed into Mars 4 billion years ago. Perseverance began its mission by studying and sampling the crater floor soon after landing. The rover’s detective work helped scientists determine that the crater floor is made of volcanic rock that formed either due to magma that bubbled up to the surface or volcanic activity on the Martian surface.
As Perseverance rolled along, the rover came across examples of sandstone and mudstone, suggesting that a river flowed into the crater millions of years after it formed. A top layer of mudstones rich with salt is all that remains to signify that a shallow lake filled the crater, reaching 22 miles (35 kilometers) wide and 100 feet (30 meters) deep, before some climatic shift caused the lake to evaporate.
Comments