NASA's Mars rover starts new campaign at different location

13/12/2024 6:17

NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has started its new campaign at a different location on the Red Planet, NASA said on Thursday.

The rover has crested the top of Jezero Crater's rim at a location the science team calls "Lookout Hill" and rolling toward its first science stop after the monthslong climb, according to NASA.

The rover made the ascent in order to explore a region of Mars unlike anywhere it has investigated before.

"During the Jezero Crater rim climb, our rover drivers have done an amazing job negotiating some of the toughest terrain we've encountered since landing," said Steven Lee, deputy project manager for Perseverance at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

"They developed innovative approaches to overcome these challenges -- even tried driving backward to see if it would help -- and the rover has come through it all like a champ. Perseverance is 'go' for everything the science team wants to throw at it during this next science campaign," he said.

Perseverance and its robotic partner, the Ingenuity helicopter, landed inside Mars' Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021. Ever since, the car-sized rover has been hunting for signs of ancient Mars life on the floor of Jezero Crater.

Perseverance's new campaign is called "Northern Rim" as its route covers the northern part of the southwestern section of Jezero's rim.

Over the first year of the Northern Rim campaign, the rover is expected to visit as many as four sites of geologic interest, take several samples, and drive about 4 miles (6.4 kilometers), according to NASA.

"The Northern Rim campaign brings us completely new scientific riches as Perseverance roves into fundamentally new geology," said Ken Farley, project scientist for Perseverance at Caltech in Pasadena. "It marks our transition from rocks that partially filled Jezero Crater when it was formed by a massive impact about 3.9 billion years ago to rocks from deep down inside Mars that were thrown upward to form the crater rim after impact."

"These rocks represent pieces of early Martian crust and are among the oldest rocks found anywhere in the solar system. Investigating them could help us understand what Mars -- and our own planet -- may have looked like in the beginning," Farley added.