Mars Perseverance Rover Completes a Marathon on Mars to Cap Off Extraordinary 5 Years
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NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover just completed a special milestone as it recently marked 5 years on the Red Planet.
The robotic science lab has put 26.2 miles under its wheels: in other words, a marathon. Having conducted hundreds of experiments so far, the rover’s data has already helped refine our understanding of the Martian surface, and in celebration of its marathon achievement, a summary of success is in order. Through its drilling efforts at the bottom of Jezero Crater, where it landed, Perseverance has helped scientists confirm that the crater at some point was filled with water, leaving lake sediments at its base.
In 2022, the rover drove up from the crater floor onto the delta, a vast expanse of 3-billion-year-old sediments that, from orbit, resembles river deltas on Earth. As the rover drove onto the delta, its Radar Imager for Mars’ Subsurface Experiment instrument (RIMFAX) fired radar waves downward at 10-centimeter intervals and measured pulses reflected from depths of about 65-feet below the surface (20 meters). With the radar, scientists can see down to the base of the sediments to reveal the top surface of the buried crater floor.
The images showed that the sediments are regular and horizontal—just like sediments deposited in lakes on Earth. That same year, the rover captured video footage of a Martian solar eclipse with the tiny moon Phobos. The potato-shaped sphere doesn’t block out the sun, but was still cool to watch.
Perseverance’s Mastcam-Z has a solar filter that acts like sunglasses to reduce light intensity. This allowed for unrivaled color and detail to appear in the eclipse video.
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