More than 15 months after landing in Jezero Crater on Mars, NASA’s Perseverance rover has finally begun its hunt for ancient life in earnest.
On 28 May, Perseverance ground a 5-centimetre-wide circular patch into a rock at the base of what was once a river delta in the crater. This delta formed billions of years ago, when a long-vanished river deposited layers of sediment into Jezero, and it is the main reason that NASA sent the rover there. On Earth, river sediment is usually teeming with life.
Images of the freshly ground spot show small sediment grains, which scientists are hoping will contain chemical or other traces of life. Poet William Blake’s “‘To see a world in a grain of sand’ comes to mind,” wrote Sanjeev Gupta, a planetary geologist at Imperial College London, on Twitter.
Close up view of a sample site photographed by NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover.
The rover ground into its first rock at the river delta in late May, clearing a circular patch for inspection.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU
The rover will spend the next few months exploring the Jezero delta, while mission scientists decide where they want to drill and extract rock samples. NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) plan to retrieve those samples and fly them back to Earth for study, no earlier than 2033, in the first-ever sample return from Mars.
‘Going to the buffet’
Perseverance landed in February 2021, several kilometres from the delta’s edge. It spent many of its early months exploring the crater floor — which unexpectedly is made of igneous rocks, a type that forms as molten materials cool. That was a scientific jackpot because scientists can date igneous rocks on the basis of the radioactive decay of their chemical elements. But many researchers have been keen for Perseverance to get to the delta, whose fine-grained sediments have the best chance of harbouring evidence of Martian life.
The rover finally arrived at the delta’s base in April. It soon spotted grey, thinly layered rocks called mudstones, which could have formed from sediments deposited by a slow river or lake. It also found sandstones with coarse grains, which might have formed in a fast-flowing river. These kinds of rock are excellent targets for studying a variety of Martian environments where life could have thrived, Katie Stack Morgan, Perseverance’s deputy project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said on 17 May during the online portion of the 2022 Astrobiology Science Conference.
NASA’s Perseverance rover is searching for the remains of life on Mars. FactsPue.
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NASA’s Perseverance rover begins key search for life on Mars
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