NASA’s Perseverance rover has completed an epic climb on Mars.
The Perseverance rover crested the rim of the Crimson Planet’s Jezero Crater this week, wrapping up a 3.5-month-long trek throughout which it gained about 1,640 vertical ft (500 meters) and tackled 20% slopes with slippery, shifting footing.
“Throughout the Jezero Crater rim climb, our rover drivers have finished a tremendous job negotiating a number of the hardest terrain we’ve encountered since touchdown,” Steven Lee, deputy challenge supervisor for Perseverance at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, stated in a statement on Thursday (Dec. 12).
“They developed modern approaches to beat these challenges — even tried driving backward to see if it could assist — and the rover has come via all of it like a champ,” Lee added. “Perseverance is ‘go’ for all the things the science crew needs to throw at it throughout this subsequent science marketing campaign.”
Associated: NASA’s Perseverance rover begins formidable ascent up a Mars crater rim
Perseverance landed on the ground of the 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) Jezero in February, on a mission to hunt for indicators of previous life on Mars and collect samples for future return to Earth.
The six-wheeled Mars rover has finished this work over the course of 4 completely different science campaigns. As Lee famous, Perseverance made the rim climb to arrange a brand new marketing campaign — one the crew is asking “Northern Rim.”
“The Northern Rim marketing campaign brings us fully new scientific riches as Perseverance roves into basically new geology,” Ken Farley, challenge scientist for Perseverance on the California Institute of Know-how in Pasadena, stated in the identical assertion.
“It marks our transition from rocks that partially crammed Jezero Crater when it was shaped by a large influence about 3.9 billion years in the past to rocks from deep down inside Mars that had been thrown upward to type the crater rim after influence,” he added. “These rocks characterize items of early Martian crust and are among the many oldest rocks discovered wherever within the photo voltaic system. Investigating them might assist us perceive what Mars — and our personal planet — might have appeared like at first.”
The brand new science marketing campaign will likely be a prolonged and concerned one; within the subsequent 12 months, Perseverance is anticipated to go to as much as 4 completely different geological websites and canopy about 4 miles (6.4 km) of Crimson Planet floor, mission crew members stated.
Perseverance reached the highest of Jezero’s rim at a spot the mission crew calls Lookout Hill. The rover has already left that website and is rolling towards Witch Hazel Hill, an fascinating outcrop about 1,500 ft (450 m) away.
“The marketing campaign begins off with a bang, as a result of Witch Hazel Hill represents over 330 ft [100 m] of layered outcrop, the place every layer is sort of a web page within the ebook of Martian historical past,” Candice Bedford, a Perseverance scientist from Purdue College in Indiana, stated in the identical assertion. “As we drive down the hill, we will likely be going again in time, investigating the traditional environments of Mars recorded within the crater rim.”
After that, the rover will head towards Lac de Charmes, which lies about 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) south.
“Lac de Charmes intrigues the science crew as a result of, being situated on the plains past the rim, it’s much less prone to have been considerably affected by the formation of Jezero Crater,” NASA officers wrote in the identical assertion.
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