The NASA Mars Rover has just exited Jezero Crater. What are the next steps?
After three and a half months of climbing, NASA's Perseverance rover has reached the summit of the Jezero crater rim. What will the next step be?
The NASA team celebrates a significant achievement following the arrival of the Perseverance rover at the top of the Jezero crater rim on Mars, a feat that took it three and a half months to complete. This six-wheeled vehicle ascended a total of 500 meters (1,640 feet) and made several stops to conduct scientific observations in its ongoing search for signs of ancient microbial life on the red planet.
Steven Lee, deputy project manager for Perseverance at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, expressed his admiration for the skills of the team driving the rover, who faced challenging terrain. “They have developed innovative approaches to overcome challenges, even testing driving in reverse to see if it helped, and the rover has come through like a champion,” Lee commented.
The rover, roughly the size of a small car, has been exploring the crater floor and the site where an ancient river delta once existed since its spectacular landing in 2021. Exploration beyond the crater will allow the team to investigate regions that have not been previously studied, with the hope of discovering different geological features and histories of Mars. The rover's upcoming scientific campaign, dubbed Northern Rim, will take Perseverance to the northern part of the southwestern section of the Jezero crater rim.
Over the course of the next year, the rover will visit up to four locations of geological interest, taking samples and traveling approximately 6.4 kilometers (4 miles). Ken Farley, project scientist for Perseverance at Caltech, stated that the Northern Rim campaign will offer new scientific treasures as the rover explores fundamentally different geology. “It marks our transition from rocks that partially filled the Jezero crater, formed during a major impact about 3.9 billion years ago, to rocks that come from the depths of Mars, which were blasted up to form the crater rim after the impact,” Farley added.
Furthermore, the rocks to be explored are considered fragments of the primitive Martian crust and are among the oldest ever found in the solar system. Their study could provide insights into what Mars—and also Earth—was like in its early days.
After the Northern Rim campaign, Perseverance will head to Witch Hazel Hill, a significant rocky outcrop located about 450 meters (1,500 feet) on the other side of the crater rim. Candice Bedford, a Perseverance scientist at Purdue University, emphasized that this site consists of more than 100 meters of layered outcrops, where each layer represents a page in the story of Mars. “As we descend down the hill, we will be moving backward in time, investigating the ancient environments of Mars that are recorded in the crater rim,” she noted.
Then it will begin a steep descent, moving away from the crater rim towards Lac de Charmes, located about 3.2 kilometers (2 miles) to the south. Lac de Charmes is particularly interesting because its location suggests it was less affected by the formation of the Jezero crater. Subsequently, Perseverance will move toward an outcrop of large blocks known as megabreccia, which could represent an ancient bedrock fragmented during the Isidis impact, a cataclysmic event that occurred around 3.9 billion years ago.
This exit from the Jezero crater represents a significant milestone for Perseverance, and updates on the next phase of its mission are expected in the coming months.
