NASA’s Perseverance Fords an Ancient River #SpaceSaturday
The Mars Perseverance Rover has to do some exploring in otder to make it to Bright Angel, NASA’s latest area of scientific interest. The area Perseverance has to cross was once a river, or so astronomers believe. Here’s more from NASA:
Perseverance is in the later stages of its fourth science campaign, looking for evidence of carbonate and olivine deposits in the “Margin Unit,” an area along the inside of Jezero Crater’s rim. Located at the base of the northern channel wall, Bright Angel features rocky light-toned outcrops that may represent either ancient rock exposed by river erosion or sediments that filled the channel. The team hopes to find rocks different from those in the carbonate-and-olivine-rich Margin Unit and gather more clues about Jezero’s history.
To get to Bright Angel, the rover drove on a ridge along the Neretva Vallis river channel, which billions of years ago carried a large amount of the water that flowed into Jezero Crater. “We started paralleling the channel in late January and were making pretty good progress, but then the boulders became bigger and more numerous,” said Evan Graser, Perseverance’s deputy strategic route planner lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “What had been drives averaging over a hundred meters per Martian day went down to only tens of meters. It was frustrating.”
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