Perseverance Rover Explores Mars for Ancient Life
NASA is exploring Mars for signs of ancient life. See how Perseverance Mars Rover searches an ancient delta in Jezero Crater.
"Perseverance drove to the Delta because it is a very promising place to look for signs of ancient life. We hope to learn more when a future mission brings these samples back to Earth. So far, we're excited by what we've collected," said Rachel Kronyak of the Perseverance science operations team .
Transcript
00:00:01 [Music] this beautiful mosaic is the most detailed image ever taken on the surface of mars it captures some of the sedimentary rocks that scientists came to the red planet to study only the very edges of the rover are visible in this mosaic nasa's perseverance mars rover is now exploring a really important part of
00:00:24 jezreel crater around 3.5 billion years ago a river flowed into lake jezreel depositing mud and sand on the crater floor forming an ancient delta what you see are some of the hills and cliffs at the edge of that delta here you can see some of perseverance's wheel tracks showing where we came from on the crater floor where we spent the
00:00:48 first year of our mission take a look at the darker gray layered rocks that make up the roughly 32 foot tall cliff in front of the rover you can see very clear horizontal layers in these rocks and you'll also notice pieces of the cliff have broken off and tumbled downhill one of the more interesting ones is the three foot tall boulder called betty's
00:01:15 rock which perseverance was able to get a closer look at [Music] these rocks have been sitting on the surface of mars for billions of years and over that time wind erosion has shaped the surface into pretty interesting forms like this balanced rock [Music]
00:01:50 immediately surrounding the rover is an area called hog wallow flats previously known as the bacon strip based on its appearance in orbital images [Music] take a look at the bright rocks the rover is sitting on we think these are some of the finest grained sedimentary rocks deposited in the delta
00:02:11 fine grain rocks are important because they're typically really good places to look for signs of ancient life we'd plan to do up to five abrasions on the rocks in this area that's where we use our drill to expose a fresh surface which allows us to analyze the chemistry and mineralogy but mars threw us some curve balls and these softer rocks didn't always
00:02:34 cooperate here you can see the result of one of our abrasion attempts the rock crumbled during the abrasion preventing us from analyzing the spot we had two unlucky abrasion attempts in this area before achieving success at the skinner ridge outcrop here we collected our first two rockcore samples from the delta and since then
00:02:56 we've collected two more perseverance drove to the delta because it is a very promising place to look for signs of ancient life we hope to learn more when a future mission brings these samples back to earth so far we're excited by what we've collected [Music]