The Perseverance rover currently exploring Mars recently celebrated a milestone. It is the first Martian year since landing. The rover will land in Jezero Crater in February 2021, almost two years from Earth, but NASA measures missions to Mars in Martian years. Mars orbits farther from the Sun than Earth does, so the year is long at 687 days, so the rover celebrated its first Mars birthday this week on January 6th.
The end of Perseverance’s first year on Mars will also mark the end of its primary mission, as the rover was designed to operate for at least one year on Mars. However, the rover is still healthy and getting stronger, so it immediately began an extended mission to explore craters for evidence of ancient life and collect samples of Martian rocks and regolith.
The rover recently started building a sample cache on Mars. The sample will be left for future Mars samples to be collected on his return his mission and brought back to Earth. We will continue to work on this project as new expansion missions are launched.
In a statement late last year, Art Thompson, project manager for Perseverance at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said, “We were still working on deploying the sample depot when the expansion mission began on January 7. So from that perspective, nothing changes.” “However, once the table is set at Three Forks, we’ll head to the top of the Delta. The science team would love to have a good look there.”
The deltas Thompson refers to are the sites of ancient river deltas and are exciting targets for exploration because they can hold clues to whether microbial life once existed on Mars. To reach the delta, the rover will have to climb a steep embankment and reach the top of the delta so that exploration can begin within the next month. Then spend eight months exploring the area.
“The Delta Top campaign is an opportunity to glimpse the geological processes beyond the walls of Jezero Crater,” said Katie Stack Morgan, Deputy Project Scientist at JPL, Perseverance. “Billions of years ago, raging rivers carried debris and rocks from miles away beyond the walls of Jezero. We plan to obtain samples from the megaliths and rocks that have been exposed.”
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