Perseverance Rover Delivers Amazing View Of Ancient Mars River

Space.com

NASA Perseverance rover captured stunning imagery of an area called "Airey Hill" in Jezero Crater on the Red Planet. Perseverance project scientist Ken Farley gives you a tour.   Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS; ESA/DLR/FU-Berlin

Transcript

00:00After a thousand sunrises on Mars, here's where NASA's Perseverance rover is exploring

00:08now.

00:09A river environment, billions of years old, that tells a dynamic story of the forces that

00:13shaped it.

00:14Let's take a tour of this area and see where we'll send the rover next.

00:20Perseverance is exploring Jezero Crater, where an ancient lake and river system once existed.

00:25If microbes ever lived here, signs of them could be preserved in these rocks.

00:30About 3.5 billion years ago, a river carved a canyon through the crater rim, filling the

00:34crater with water and depositing sand and rocks that formed a delta.

00:39On Earth, the record of such an ancient river and lake would have been erased long ago.

00:43That's why sending a robotic explorer like Perseverance is so valuable.

00:47Mars is a special place that preserves a unique record of things that happened in the first

00:51billion years of the solar system.

00:55In this area, different rock layers record different parts of the crater's history.

00:59The flat, light-colored rocks were deposited on the banks of a river, flowing slowly across

01:03the landscape.

01:05The boulders in the distance were deposited later, in what was likely a raging torrent.

01:10And if this peculiar outcrop caught your attention, it did ours as well.

01:14It doesn't look like sediment at all.

01:16Perhaps it's a remnant of a lava flow, now mostly eroded away.

01:20Lab equipment on Earth can accurately measure when a volcanic rock was formed, so if we

01:24can return a sample of this lava to Earth in the future, we may know when and for how

01:28long water flowed into Jezero.

01:33From here, Perseverance will continue west.

01:35In the distance, you can trace the tops of the natural levees that formed at the near

01:39and far banks of the river.

01:46The rover will pass this area on its way upstream, continuing toward this spot, where the river

01:51carved through the crater wall.

01:52You can see the canyon on the horizon here.

01:59From there, Perseverance will be well-positioned to head south and descend this natural ramp

02:04that leads up and out of the crater.

02:06We're lucky to have a route the rover can safely drive up the rim, right where we need it.

02:11Starting the climb would mark a new and exciting phase of the mission, exploring rocks far

02:15older than those in Jezero and produced in an entirely different way.

02:20One tempting target are these light-colored rocks partway up the rim.

02:23They may have interacted with hot water in a hydrothermal environment, another exciting

02:27place to hunt for evidence of past life.

02:31Since finishing its study of the crater floor, Perseverance has been climbing the delta and

02:35piecing together the history of this once watery environment.

02:38We've come a long way in nearly three years of exploring and collecting samples, but there's

02:42still so much more to investigate.

02:45Follow the journey at mars.nasa.gov slash perseverance.

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