Perseverance traverse in Jezero crater

Perseverance and Ingenuity · 2021 CE – 2026 CE · Mars

Perseverance traverse in Jezero crater — Perseverance and Ingenuity · 2021 CE – 2026 CE · Mars — Recorded expedition route · schematic map

Seek signs of ancient life in a river delta and set aside samples for a return to Earth.

Historical context

Jezero held a lake fed by a river some 3.5 billion years ago, and its delta could have collected and preserved ancient organic molecules and other signs of microbial life, if there were any. Perseverance, built and run by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was sent not only to look for such signs but to choose and seal the rocks that laboratories on Earth might one day examine. It landed on 18 February 2021 with a small helicopter, Ingenuity, under its belly, to find out whether anything could fly in such thin air.

The voyage, step by step

  1. Octavia E. Butler Landing

    18 February 2021

    On 18 February 2021, after 203 days and 472 million kilometres, the rover was lowered by a rocket-powered sky crane onto the floor of Jezero crater. Mission control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced the touchdown at 20:55 Universal Time, 12:55 in Pasadena. On 5 March NASA named the spot Octavia E. Butler Landing, for the science-fiction writer.

  2. Wright Brothers Field

    19 April 2021

    On 19 April 2021 a helicopter of 1.8 kilograms rose three metres above Jezero, held a stable hover for thirty seconds and landed after 39.1 seconds in the air. NASA called it the first powered, controlled flight by an aircraft on another planet.

  3. Séítah and the first cores

    December 2021

    After a first attempt crumbled to dust, the rover cored its first rock, Rochette, on a ridge top on 1 September 2021. In Séítah, a stretch of sand and olivine-rich rock whose name means “amongst the sand” in the Navajo language, it took more cores before the end of the year. The rocks of the crater floor proved to be igneous rock altered by water, rather than lake sediment.

  4. The delta front

    13 April 2022

    On 13 April 2022, after a record dash of thirty-one Martian days across about five kilometres, the rover reached a spot called Three Forks, at the foot of the fan of sediment where a river once ran into the crater’s lake. The delta rises about forty metres above the crater floor.

  5. Hogwallow Flats

    20 July 2022

    On 20 July 2022, in a layer of the delta front that the team calls Hogwallow Flats, the rover abraded a rock a metre wide named Wildcat Ridge. It was a fine mudstone, likely laid down as mud and fine sand settled in an evaporating salty lake, and the SHERLOC instrument registered the most abundant organic detections of the mission so far.

  6. The depot at Three Forks

    28 January 2023

    In less than six weeks, ending on 28 January 2023, the rover laid ten sealed tubes on flat ground near the base of the delta, in a zigzag, each five to fifteen metres from its nearest neighbour. NASA called it the first sample depot on another world.

  7. Up the fan

    21 July 2024

    Climbing the fan, the rover reached rocks laid down by the river rather than the lake. In July 2024, on the northern edge of Neretva Vallis, an ancient river valley four hundred metres wide, it found an arrowhead-shaped rock the team named Cheyava Falls, after a Grand Canyon waterfall, and on 21 July drilled its twenty-second rock core from it.

  8. Out onto the rim

    10 December 2024

    On 10 December 2024, after three and a half months climbing some five hundred metres up grades as steep as twenty per cent, the rover crested the rim of Jezero at a spot the team calls Lookout Hill and took its first view westward over the rim.

Outcome

Crater floor and delta rocks sampled, a depot of ten sealed tubes left at Three Forks, a rock with potential biosignatures cored at Cheyava Falls and the crater rim reached in December 2024; Ingenuity flew seventy-two times.

Perseverance and Ingenuity

Rover caching rock samples in Jezero crater since February 2021, and carrier of Ingenuity, which NASA called the first aircraft to fly on another planet.

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