NASA’s Perseverance spacecraft has just passed a major milestone on the Red Planet.
The car-sized Perseverance rover is now exploring its exotic environs for 1,000 sols, or sols. (One Martian day is slightly longer than an Earth day — 24 hours and 37 minutes.)
“I have completed 1,000 sols…and my work is not complete yet,” Perseverance team members wrote on Tuesday (December 12). Through the official account of the mission on the X website (formerly known as Twitter).
This post indicates that Sol 1000 was Tuesday. However, persevere Pictures library Tuesday is identified as Sol 999, suggesting that today (December 13) may be the rover’s 1,000th.
Related: The Perseverance rover captures stunning video of a solar eclipse on Mars
Perseverance and its small robotic partner, the Ingenuity helicopter, landed inside Jezero Crater on Mars on February 18, 2021. Since then, the large spacecraft has been searching for signs of ancient life on Mars on the floor of the 28-mile-wide (45-kilometer) Jezero Crater, a place Great to do such work.
“We chose Jezero Crater as a landing site because orbital images showed a delta — clear evidence that a large lake once filled the crater,” said Perseverance project scientist Ken Farley of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He said in a statement on Tuesday.
“The lake is a habitable environment, and the delta rocks are a wonderful environment for burying signs of ancient life as fossils in the geological record,” Farley added. “After comprehensive exploration, we compiled the geological history of the crater, and charted the stage of the lake and river from beginning to end.”
This history begins about four billion years ago, when an asteroid impact led to the formation of the crater.
Perseverance found that Jezero’s floor is made of volcanic rock. Members of the mission team said that sandstones and claystones above that basal layer show that the river began flowing into Jezero, and sediments were deposited there, a few hundred million years after the crater was formed. This flow eventually formed a large lake, up to 22 miles (35 km) wide, with a maximum depth of perhaps 100 feet (30 m).
The delta is also studded with rocks that originated outside Jezero. They were carried away by powerful torrents, according to the mission’s scientists.
“We’ve been able to see the broad outlines of these chapters in Jezero’s history in orbital images, but it takes getting closer to Perseverance to understand the timeline in detail,” said team member Libby Ives, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 2013. Southern California, which runs the Perseverance mission, said in the same statement.
Perseverance is also collecting and temporarily storing samples, which will be returned to Earth by a joint NASA-ESA campaign in the 2030s, if all goes according to plan (although there’s no guarantee it will).
The rover’s sample count is now at 23, mission team members announced in a statement Tuesday, and in a presentation that day at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. The stolen items include some interesting bits of Red Planet material.
“One sample called ‘Lefroy Bay’ contains a large amount of fine-grained silica, a material known to preserve ancient fossils on Earth,” NASA officials wrote in a statement on Tuesday. “The other ‘Otis Peak’ contains a large amount of phosphate, which is often associated with life as we know it. Both samples are also rich in carbonates, which can preserve a record of environmental conditions since the rocks were forming.”
Ingenuity is also celebrating its 1,000 sols as well, and the 4-pound (1.8 kg) helicopter’s staying power is a bit surprising. Creativity is a technology demonstrator. Its primary mission called for a five-flight campaign, to show that atmospheric exploration is possible on Mars despite the planet’s thin atmosphere.
Ingenuity successfully carried out this mission in the spring of 2021, and was then granted a mission extension to serve as a rover for Perseverance. The helicopter has completed 62 flights on this extended mission to date, and remains active to this day.
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