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Perseverance Kicks off the Crater Rim Campaign!
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By NASA
1 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
Dr. Kenyon, far right, and three other umpires listen to the national anthem before the start of a baseball game.Credit: West Springfield Little League
As the director of NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Dr. Jimmy Kenyon is used to making important decisions at work. He also likes to call the shots on the baseball field as a volunteer umpire.
In July, Kenyon packed up his gear and traveled to Ankeny, Iowa, as part of a four-man umpire crew for the Little League Intermediate 50/70 Baseball Central Region Tournament. He was selected for this crew assignment in May, as the Little League season was getting underway.
Dr. Jimmy Kenyon in action as a volunteer umpire during a Little League baseball game. Credit: West Springfield Little League “Making the call is part of the job at NASA Glenn, but it’s also something I enjoy as a volunteer umpire for Little League Baseball and softball,” Kenyon said. “It allows me to share the excitement of baseball and NASA with young players, who may very well be part of our future workforce someday.”
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By NASA
Mars: Perseverance (Mars 2020) Perseverance Home Mission Overview Rover Components Mars Rock Samples Where is Perseverance? Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Mission Updates Science Overview Objectives Instruments Highlights Exploration Goals News and Features Multimedia Perseverance Raw Images Images Videos Audio More Resources Mars Missions Mars Sample Return Mars Perseverance Rover Mars Curiosity Rover MAVEN Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Mars Odyssey More Mars Missions The Solar System The Sun Mercury Venus Earth The Moon Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune Pluto & Dwarf Planets Asteroids, Comets & Meteors The Kuiper Belt The Oort Cloud 2 min read
Margin’ up the Crater Rim!
NASA’s Mars rover Perseverance conducts proximity science on the Eremita Mesa abrasion patch in the Margin Unit on Sept. 6, 2024, as it continues its traverse up the rim of Jezero Crater. Perseverance acquired the image using its Front Left Hazard Avoidance Camera A (Hazcam) on sol 1261 — Martian day 1,261 of the Mars 2020 mission — at the local mean solar time of 13:53:53. NASA/JPL-Caltech To conclude its exploration of the mysterious margin unit before it ascends the rim of Jezero Crater, Perseverance made one last stop this past week to investigate these strange rocks at “Eremita Mesa.”
Since beginning its steep drive up the crater rim, Perseverance has been traversing along the edge of the margin unit (the margin of the margin!), an enigmatic unit rich in carbonates, a mineral group closely linked to habitability. Here, the rover team scouted out a mound of rock called “Specter Chasm,” where Perseverance cleared away the dusty, weathered surface with its trusty abrading bit. The resulting abraded patch, called Eremita Mesa, is pictured above being investigated by Perseverance’s proximity science instruments mounted on its robotic arm. This includes taking close-up images to examine the millimeter-scale particles that make up the rock, using the WATSON (Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering) camera, which functions as Perseverance’s magnifying glass.
Before the rover began exploring, investigations using orbital satellite data had suggested the margin unit rocks may have formed in several different ways. Theories the team has been exploring include that the unit formed on the shoreline of the ancient lake that once filled Jezero Crater, or instead that it was produced by volcanic processes such as pyroclastic flows or ashfall, or ancient lavas flowing into the crater. Since Perseverance began its investigation of the unit in September 2023, more than 350 sols ago (1 sol = 1 Mars day), the Science Team has been scouring data collected by the rover’s instruments to help constrain the unit’s origin. So far, this has remained largely a mystery, with the original rock textures potentially heavily affected by alteration since it formed more than 3 billion years ago. Perseverance has already collected three exciting samples of this curious rock unit for future Earth return: “Pelican Point,” “Lefroy Bay,” and “Comet Geyser,” and the team is hoping the data collected at Eremita Mesa could help further constrain the ancient processes on Mars that formed these strange rocks.
Next, it’s onwards and upwards for Perseverance as it faces a steep climb up the crater rim, where perhaps even more exotic and exciting rocks await!
Written by Alex Jones, Ph.D. student at Imperial College London
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Last Updated Sep 10, 2024 Related Terms
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By NASA
5 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
This panorama shows the area NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover will climb in coming months to crest Jezero Crater’s rim. It is made up of 59 images taken by the rover’s Mastcam-Z on Aug. 4.NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS After 2½ years exploring Jezero Crater’s floor and river delta, the rover will ascend to an area where it will search for more discoveries that could rewrite Mars’ history.
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover will soon begin a monthslong ascent up the western rim of Jezero Crater that is likely to include some of the steepest and most challenging terrain the rover has encountered to date. Scheduled to start the week of Aug. 19, the climb will mark the kickoff of the mission’s new science campaign — its fifth since the rover landed in the crater on Feb. 18, 2021.
“Perseverance has completed four science campaigns, collected 22 rock cores, and traveled over 18 unpaved miles,” said Perseverance project manager Art Thompson of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “As we start the Crater Rim Campaign, our rover is in excellent condition, and the team is raring to see what’s on the roof of this place.”
Two of the priority regions the science team wants to study at the top of the crater are nicknamed “Pico Turquino” and “Witch Hazel Hill.” Imagery from NASA’s Mars orbiters indicates that Pico Turquino contains ancient fractures that may have been caused by hydrothermal activity in the distant past.
One of the navigation cameras aboard NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover captured this view looking back at the “Bright Angel” area on July 30, the 1,224th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. NASA/JPL-Caltech Orbital views of Witch Hazel show layered materials that likely date from a time when Mars had a very different climate than today. Those views have revealed light-toned bedrock similar to what was found at “Bright Angel,” the area where Perseverance recently discovered and sampled the “Cheyava Falls” rock, which exhibits chemical signatures and structures that could possibly have been formed by life billions of years ago when the area contained running water.
It’s Sedimentary
During the river delta exploration phase of the mission, the rover collected the only sedimentary rock ever sampled from a planet other than Earth. Sedimentary rocks are important because they form when particles of various sizes are transported by water and deposited into a standing body of water; on Earth, liquid water is one of the most important requirements for life as we know it.
A study published Wednesday, Aug. 14, in AGU Advances chronicles the 10 rock cores gathered from sedimentary rocks in an ancient Martian delta, a fan-shaped collection of rocks and sediment that formed billions of years ago at the convergence of a river and a crater lake.
The core samples collected at the fan front are the oldest, whereas the rocks cored at the fan top are likely the youngest, produced when flowing water deposited sediment in the western fan.
“Among these rock cores are likely the oldest materials sampled from any known environment that was potentially habitable,” said Tanja Bosak, a geobiologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and member of Perseverance’s science team. “When we bring them back to Earth, they can tell us so much about when, why, and for how long Mars contained liquid water and whether some organic, prebiotic, and potentially even biological evolution may have taken place on that planet.”
This map shows the route NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover will take (in blue) as it climbs the western rim of Jezero Crater, first reaching “Dox Castle,” then investigating the “Pico Turquino” area before approaching “Witch Hazel Hill.” NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona Onward to the Crater Rim
As scientifically intriguing as the samples have been so far, the mission expects many more discoveries to come.
“Our samples are already an incredibly scientifically compelling collection, but the crater rim promises to provide even more samples that will have significant implications for our understanding of Martian geologic history,” said Eleni Ravanis, a University of Hawaiì at Mānoa scientist on Perseverance’s Mastcam-Z instrument team and one of the Crater Rim Campaign science leads. “This is because we expect to investigate rocks from the most ancient crust of Mars. These rocks formed from a wealth of different processes, and some represent potentially habitable ancient environments that have never been examined up close before.”
Reaching the top of the crater won’t be easy. To get there, Perseverance will rely on its auto-navigation capabilities as it follows a route that rover planners designed to minimize hazards while still giving the science team plenty to investigate. Encountering slopes of up to 23 degrees on the journey (rover drivers avoid terrain that would tilt Perseverance more than 30 degrees), the rover will have gained about 1,000 feet (300 meters) in elevation by the time it summits the crater’s rim at a location the science team has dubbed “Aurora Park.”
Then, perched hundreds of meters above a crater floor stretching 28 miles (45 kilometers) across, Perseverance can begin the next leg of its adventure.
More Mission Information
A key objective of Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including caching samples that may contain signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, to help pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet and as the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith.
NASA’s Mars Sample Return Program, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), is designed to send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.
The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed for the agency by Caltech, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.
For more about Perseverance:
science.nasa.gov/mission/mars-2020-perseverance
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Alise Fisher / Erin Morton
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
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Last Updated Aug 14, 2024 Related Terms
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By NASA
Personnel from the MSFC Earth Science Branch and local partners participated in the Investigation of Microphysics and Precipitation for Atlantic Coast-Threatening Snowstorms (IMPACTS), and they are members of the IMPACTS team that recently won the prestigious Presidential Rank Group Achievement Award from NASA. IMPACTS was a highly successful NASA Earth Venture Suborbital airborne field campaign that examined why and how heavy snowfalls occur, as well as how NASA missions can better detect and measure these events. The suborbital mission had three flight campaigns in 2020, 2022, and 2023, and used the NASA ER-2 and P-3 aircraft. MSFC contributed the Advanced Microwave Precipitation Radiometer (AMPR) and the Lightning Instrument Package (LIP) to IMPACTS, and both instruments flew on the ER-2.
MSFC Earth science and engineering civil servants that contributed to IMPACTS over the years include Timothy Lang, Chris Schultz, Mason Quick, Rich Blakeslee (Emeritus), Paul Meyer (Emeritus), Patrick Duran, Eric Cantrell, Max Vankeuren, Kurt Dietz, David Hyde, Tom Phillips, Patrick Fulda, and Mark James. MSFC partners for IMPACTS included University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH; Doug Huie, Jonathan Hicks, Julia Burton, Philip Alldredge, Dave Simmons, Sue O’Brien, Amanda Richter, Corey Amiot, Sebastian Harkema, Monte Bateman, Mike Stewart, Scott Podgorny, David Corredor, Dennis Buechler, Jeff Daskar, Dan Walker), Universities Space Research Association (USRA; Doug Mach), Jacobs (Mark Sloan, Lisa Gibby), and The Aerospace Corporation (Sayak Biswas). MSFC resource analyst support for IMPACTS was provided by Robyn Rudock, Jennifer Thovson, Jacob Guthrie,Chris Anthony, and Lisa Dorsett.
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