The Mars 2020 descent stage lowers NASA’s Perseverance rover onto the Red Planet on Feb. 18, 2021. The image is from video captured by a camera aboard the descent stage.
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Weighing roughly 1 ton (1,025 kilograms), Perseverance is the heaviest rover ever to touch down on Mars, returning dramatic video of its landing. The rover collected the first rock core samples from another planet (it’s carrying six so far), served as an indispensable base station for Ingenuity, the first helicopter on Mars, and tested MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment), the first prototype oxygen generator on the Red Planet.
Perseverance snapped this view of a hill called “Santa Cruz” on April 29, 2021. About 20 inches (50 centimeters) across on average, the boulders in the foreground are among the type of rocks the rover team has named “Ch’ał” (the Navajo term for “frog” and pronounced “chesh”). Perseverance will return to the area next week or so.
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS
Scientists can approximate the age of a planet or moon’s surface by counting its impact craters. Older surfaces have had more time to accumulate impact craters of various sizes. In the case of the Moon, scientists were able to refine their estimates by analyzing Apollo lunar samples. They’ve taken those lessons to narrow down the age estimates of surfaces on Mars. But having rock samples from the Red Planet would improve crater-based estimates of how old the surface is – and help them find more pieces of the puzzle that is Mars’ geological history.
NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance mission captured thrilling footage of the rover landing in Mars’ Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021.
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Andrew Good
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
Karen Fox / Alana Johnson
NASA Headquarters, Washington
