NASA's Perseverance rover celebrated its one-year anniversary on Mars by collecting rock samples in hopes of discovering signs of past life on the red planet.
The robot has traveled more than three kilometers on the red planet's rocky surface, recorded the first flight on Mars when a helicopter flew, and successfully gathered six precious rock samples. If all goes well, the rock samples will one day be returned to earth, along with other items, to be studied by scientists.
NASA's Perseverance Rover
The Perseverance rover touched down in Jezero Crater, which is located just north of the Martian equator, on Feb. 18, 2021. The robot's initial goal was to search the red planet for any evidence that life once lived on the celestial body.
Researchers planned to use the $2.7-billion rover to look for these signs of life in an ancient delta. It is the place where a river is believed to have once flowed into the crater and deposited sediments and rocks. The environment is thought to have been capable of supporting life, as per Nature.
The ones who are controlling the Perseverance rover are now accelerating the robot's primary mission of searching for these signs of life. The situation comes as the rover spent several months testing its own system and of the tiny helicopter known as Ingenuity to make sure they were working properly.
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The Perseverance rover is about the size of an SUV and begins its second year on the red planet. Researchers plan to have the robot make a relatively quick trip to the ancient river delta and crater rim that towers hundreds of feet over the crater floor.
According to UPI, NASA hopes that the rover will be able to collect dozens of samples from the delta and crater rim in the next two years. Associate professor of planetary science at Indiana-based Purdue University, Briony Horgan, said that it was an extremely ambitious goal.
Signs of Life
The project manager for the Perseverance rover, Jennifer Trosper, said that the robot was doing phenomenally well since it landed on Mars. Scientists believe that based on Jezero's topography, the area was a body of water roughly the size of Lake Tahoe more than three billion years ago. They believe that rivers flowed in from the west and flowed out through to the eastern part.
Another crucial feature that the Perseverance rover was able to perform was generating oxygen, something that will eventually prove useful when astronauts finally make it to the red planet. A professor of geosciences at Stony Brook University in New York and a member of the mission's science team, Joel Hurowitz, said that the past year has been an exciting and exhausting time.
A professor of geology at the University of Florida and a member of the Perseverance science team, Amy Williams, said that deltas were known to be habitable environments, based on knowledge from Earth. She noted there used to be water and that active sediment was transported from a river into a lake in the area, the New York Times reported.
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