Exploring Jezero Crater: NASA's Perseverance Rover Probes Secrets of Ancient Martian Lake

Monday - January 1 2024, 12:41 UTC - 10 months ago

NASA's Perseverance Rover is investigating Jezero Crater, an ancient lake and river system located on Mars. The crater provides insight into Mars' ancient river delta history, and potentially holds the secrets of ancient life forms. The crater was formed 3.5 billion years ago due to the river carving a canyon through the crater rim, and deposits of sand and rocks formed a delta. The area is comprised of different rock layers of river and volcanic activity, making it an invaluable site for exploration.

Perseverance rover’s 360-degree panorama of Mars, featuring 2.38 billion pixels from Jezero Crater, offers insights into the planet’s ancient river delta history.

After 1,000 Martian days of exploration, NASA’s Perseverance rover is studying rocks that show several eras in the history of a river delta billions of years old. Scientists are investigating this region of Mars, known as Jezero Crater, to see if they can find evidence of ancient life recorded in the rocks. Perseverance project scientist Ken Farley provides a guided tour of a richly detailed panorama of the rover’s location in November 2023, taken by the Mastcam-Z instrument.

Composed of 993 individual images and 2.38 billion pixels, this 360-degree mosaic looks in all directions from a location the rover science team calls “Airey Hill.” Portions of the rover itself are visible in the scene, appearing more distorted toward the edges as a result of the image processing.

A color enhancement applied to the image increases contrast and accentuates color differences. By approximating what the scene would look like under Earth-like lighting conditions, the adjustment allows mission scientists to use their everyday experience to interpret the landscape. The view on Mars would be darker and more reddish. The panorama can be explored and downloaded at: 

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS; ESA/DLR/FU-Berlin .

Related: NASA’s Perseverance Rover Probes Secrets of Ancient Martian Lake .

Video Transcript .

Ken Farley, Perseverance Rover Project Scientist: .

After a thousand sunrises on Mars, here’s where NASA’s Perseverance rover is exploring now: a river environment, billions of years old, that tells a dynamic story of the forces that shaped it. Let’s take a tour of this area and see where we’ll send the rover next.

Perseverance is exploring Jezero Crater, where an ancient lake and river system once existed. If microbes ever lived here, signs of them could be preserved in these rocks.

About 3.5 billion years ago, a river carved a canyon through the crater rim, filling the crater with water and depositing sand and rocks that formed a delta. On Earth, the record of such an ancient river and lake would have been erased long ago. That’s why sending a robotic explorer like Perseverance is so valuable: Mars is a special place that preserves a unique record of things that happened in the first billion years of the solar system.

In this area, different rock layers record different parts of the crater’s history. The flat, light-colored rocks were deposited on the banks of a river flowing slowly across the landscape.

The boulders in the distance were deposited later, in what was likely a raging torrent.

And if this peculiar outcrop caught your attention, it did ours as well. It doesn’t look like sediment at all – perhaps it’s a remnant of a lava flow, now mostly eroded away. Lab equipment on Earth can accurately measure when a volcanic rock was formed, so if we can return a sample of this lava to Earth in the future, we may know when and for how lon a volcanic fury filled this region.