Jezero Crater's "Delta Scarp" – A NASA Perseverance Rover Scientist's Favorite Martian Image - SciTechDaily

Mars’ ‘Delta Scarp’ From More Than a Mile Away: Perseverance scientist Vivian Sun was excited to see certain geologic features in imagery of Jezero Crater’s “Delta Scarp” because they provide evidence of a watery past.

A Perseverance rover scientist’s favorite shot from the young Mars mission provides a new angle on an old and intriguing surface feature.

And for Vivian Sun, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, it’s an image NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover took of one of Jezero Crater’s escarpments (long, steep slopes at the edge of a plateau) – so far away but yet so tantalizingly close.

“I’ve been studying Jezero Crater for years and must have looked at orbital images of the Delta Scarp over a thousand times,” said Sun.

“But you can only learn so much from orbit, and when this image of the scarp came down to Earth from the rover after landing, it literally took my breath away.

Two Views of Delta Scarp: This composite image of Jezero Crater’s “Delta Scarp” was generated using data from the Perseverance rover’s Remote Microscopic Imager and Mastcam-Z camera.

The mission expects to explore the Delta Scarp region during Perseverance’s second science campaign, sometime next year.

Perseverance to Delta Scarp: This annotated image of Mars’ Jezero Crater depicts the location of NASA’s Perseverance rover (yellow dot) and the field of view of its Remote Microscopic Imager (RMI) camera when it took a series of images of the “Delta Scarp” on March 17, 2021.

It was stitched together from five images taken by the rover’s Remote Microscopic Imager (RMI) camera on March 17, 2021 (the 26th Martian day, or sol of the mission), from 1.4 miles (2.25 kilometers) away.

A key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life.

The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust).

The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet

JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover

June 21, 2021

June 21, 2021