Here's What's Next for NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover - Gizmodo Australia

The Perseverance rover is gearing up to drill some Martian rocks, and mission scientists have seen evidence for ancient flash flooding in the dried-up lakebed where the rover landed. NASA shared these updates and more during a press conference today at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Perseverance is tasked with exploring Mars’ Jezero Crater, the site of a former lake that NASA scientists hope could contain fossilized evidence of Martian life.

These formations shed light on the Red Planet’s geologic history, and some of them are promising sites to investigate for biosignatures (evidence of life), which researchers expect could look like the stromatolites encased in ancient rock on Earth.

Ultimately, the rock samples collected by the rover will be grabbed by another mission and brought to Earth — the first materials that will be retrieved from Mars.

Olivier Toupet, the rover’s enhanced navigation team lead, said that a major improvement in the rover’s artificial intelligence system has meant that the rover can think about where it will go next while it is driving, a big step beyond the stop-and-go navigation of previous rovers.

Another demonstration besides Ingenuity was MOXIE, in which Perseverance generated a small amount of oxygen on the Martian surface, which has huge implications for human ambitions beyond Earth.

Perseverance scientists expect the lake bed will hold some of the oldest rocks that the rover will have the chance to look at before it heads to the river delta.

“One of the hypotheses that we’re trying to test is that the lake that once filled Jezero wasn’t there just once, but that it went through multiple episodes of filling up, drying down, and filling up again,” said Ken Farley, a Perseverance project scientist at Caltech, during the press conference.

Farley said that images taken by Perseverance indicated that Jezero’s ancient lake had different water levels at different times, and that scientists saw evidence that ancient flash flooding moved large boulders across the delta.

Artuby appears to be fossilised Martian mud, exactly the sort of stagnant, unperturbed material from the ancient lake that NASA wants to investigate.

For sampling, the rover will first abrade the rock surface to clear it of any concealing elements, like Martian dust.

Witness tubes are very similar to the tubes meant for samples, but they contain with materials that detect contaminants.

Witness tubes are opened and sealed to sample the local Martian environment before extracting any rock, so that when all the tubes are returned to Earth, NASA scientists will know whether any Earthly contaminations were present during sample collection

There are 38 other tubes meant to take on samples — that’s 38 opportunities for us Earthlings to see what Mars is made of, how the planet has changed, and what, if anything, once lived there

Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for science at NASA, said the samples could be expected to arrive on Earth by the early 2030s