NASA’s newest rover has roamed multiple miles around the Red Planet’s Jezero crater, searching N for signs of ancient life and hints about Mars’ past. The rover, part of NASA’s ambitious Mars 2020 mission, has been collecting a huge amount of information about the Martian surface and its rocks. The team behind the Perseverance rover has published three new research papers detailing their findings so far. The data reveals a “story of fire and water” in Mars’ history, said Briony Horgan, a planetary scientist at Purdue University in Indiana and co-author of one of the new studies.
Perseverance is NASA’s most advanced rover yet and can study Martian rocks in greater detail than any predecessor. Its suite of instruments includes the Mastcam-Z, the ‘eyes’ of the rover that allow it to study rocks at a distance, as well as two pieces of technology that perform X-ray and ultraviolet spectroscopy, analysing in detail the make-up of rocks and minerals. “These papers demonstrate the power of the Mars 2020 payload,” said Horgan. “By studying the geology of Jezero from outcrop scales with Mastcam-Z all the way down to individual grains, we’ve been able to piece together the complex history of the crater floor.”