Evrim Yazgin
Cosmos science journalist
NASA’s Perseverance rover has stumbled upon intriguing rocky outcrops on the rim of Mars’s Jezero crater.
The abundance of diverse rocks will help scientists understand the planet’s history, including whether it was habitable in the past and if it is today.
Perseverance landed on Jazero crater in 2021 and since January has been analysing and collecting samples from the hodgepodge of rocks on the crater rim. It has cored 5 rocks, sealing samples from 3 in tubes. It has also done close-up analysis of 7 rocks while assessing another 83 from afar, by zapping them with a laser.
It might not sound like a lot of work over several months, but this is the plucky little rover’s fastest science mission since it landed on Mars.
The rocks are on the rim of the Jezero crater. The car-sized rover reached the rim in December 2024 and is exploring a 135m-tall slope dubbed by scientists “Witch Hazel Hill”.
“During previous science campaigns in Jezero, it could take several months to find a rock that was significantly different from the last rock we sampled and scientifically unique enough for sampling,” says project scientist Katie Stack Morgan of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). “But up here on the crater rim, there are new and intriguing rocks everywhere the rover turns. It has been all we had hoped for and more.”
Jezero’s western rim has lots of fragmented rocks which were once molten. They were brought to the surface by meteor impacts billions of years ago, possibly including the impact that created the crater.
Perseverance sampled its first crater rim rock on January 28. This rock, called “Shallow Bay”, likely formed about 3.9 billion years ago. This may be the oldest sample collected by the rover.
About 110m from Shallow Bay is another rock which caught scientists’ eyes. It contains minerals crystalised from magma deep in the Martian crust. These minerals will help scientists discover more about how Mars formed and evolved over billions of years.
“The last 4 months have been a whirlwind for the science team, and we still feel that Witch Hazel Hill has more to tell us,” says Stack. “We’ll use all the rover data gathered recently to decide if and where to collect the next sample from the crater rim. Crater rims – you gotta love ‘em.”
