Discovery on Mars: Perseverance hits a geological “goldmine”
NASA’s Perseverance rover has ‘struck gold’ on the surface of Mars in a sensational discovery.
Along the western rim of Jezero Crater on Mars, which scientists believe is a dried up lake bed, NASA’s Perseverance rover has hit a goldmine.
The long journey across Mars’ surface led the rover to the the crater in December, perched on a slope known as Witch Hazel Hill, where it has been working since. Recently, it began drilling into the crust and the results have now come in, stunning the lab-coated boffins.
The Squiddly Diddly-esque capabilities of the machine are something to behold: if it’s not simply storing samples of rocks, the rover has been performing detailed geological analyses, hitting a total of 83 other rocks with its laser for remote study by those at home.
‘It has been all we had hoped for and more’
Katie Stack Morgan, Perseverance’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a statement that “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. 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.”
The statement adds that "Jezero Crater’s western rim contains tons of fragmented once-molten rocks that were knocked out of their subterranean home billions of years ago by one or more meteor impacts", with space.com adding the current batch of samples collected form part of what they call “a scientific goldmine”.
A rock known as Tablelands was inspected by the rover, with intriguing results:
Data from the rover’s instruments indicates that Tablelands is made almost entirely of serpentine minerals, which form when large amounts of water react with iron- and magnesium-bearing minerals in igneous rock. During this process, called serpentinization, the rock’s original structure and mineralogy change, often causing it to expand and fracture. Byproducts of the process sometimes include hydrogen gas, which can lead to the generation of methane in the presence of carbon dioxide. On Earth, such rocks can support microbial communities.
Three more rocky outcrops remain - Sally’s Cove, Dennis Pond, and Mount Pearl - in the current segment of the long mission, but Perseverance, as the name suggests, is not slowing down. “The last four months have been a whirlwind for the science team, and we still feel that Witch Hazel Hill has more to tell us,” said Stack Morgan. “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.”
Now that I've completed my climb out of Jezero Crater, I'm back to #SamplingMars!
— NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) January 29, 2025
My 26th sample, known as "Silver Mountain," has textures unlike anything we've seen before. I've sealed the rock core in a sample tube so it can be analyzed in labs on Earth in the future. pic.twitter.com/YqEPZnDnfR
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Astronomers are especially excited about Perseverance’s first sample from a crater rim, dubbed Silver Mountain. According to NASA, it’s a rare and invaluable find that likely dates back at least 3.9 billion years to the Noachian era—a time when Mars was heavily bombarded, forming much of the cratered terrain visible today. “My 26th sample, called ‘Silver Mountain,’ has textures unlike anything we’ve encountered before,” the rover’s official X account shared in February.
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