My Favorite Martian Image: Jezero Crater's 'Delta Scarp' – NASA's Mars Exploration Program - NASA Mars Exploration

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.

“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.

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

At present, the rover is in the opening days of its first science campaign, exploring a 1.5-square-mile (4-square-kilometer) patch of crater floor that may contain Jezero’s deepest (and most ancient) layers of exposed bedrock, along with other intriguing geologic features.

It is during this initial campaign that they’ll collect the first samples from another planet for return to Earth by a future mission.

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

Managed by the Mars Exploration Program and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate