NASA ’s Perseverance Mars Rover Found Some Boulders. That’s a Much Bigger Deal Than it Seems

The rule for most Mars missions, or at least those looking for signs of life? Follow the water. Choose a place that was once wet—and Mars’s now-dry riverbeds, sea basins and ocean floors offer plenty of those—and do your spelunking there. With limited missions and a multitude of promising sites, however, the trick is to choose just the right landing zone. Now, a new paper in Science suggests that when it comes to NASA’s Perseverance rover, which landed on the Red Planet in February, mission planners chose right indeed. Perseverance touched down in Jezero Crater, a 45 km (28 mile) wide depression in Isidis Planitia, which is itself a 1,200 km (750 mi) plain in the northern Martian hemisphere. About 3.7 billion years ago, Jezero Crater was Jezero Lake—a standing body of water up to 2,500 m (1.5 mi.) deep. Pictures taken from orbit by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show a fan-shaped formation along the crater’s western rim, which was once a broad delta fed by an inflowing river that helped fill the basin. But when the rover touched down, researchers got a closer look—and what they found was stunning indeed. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] For the new study, a team of 39 investigators led by planetary geologist Nicolas Mangold of France’s University of Nantes, analyzed images taken within Jezero by two of the Perseverance rover’s suite of 19 cameras. The team initially focused on a formation dubbed Kodia...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Space Source Type: news