On Mars, persistence describes a complex environment

For nearly two years, NASA’s Perseverance Rover The Martian Crater crosses Jezero, the site of an ancient lake. If one of the mission’s ultimate goals is to bring rock samples back to Earth, the rover will communicate daily with our planet and transmit analytical results with its instruments. A new series of articles has been published in the journals Science And Scientific advancesand provides some keys to understanding the geological history of the crater.

Remember that this landing spot is not chosen at random. Located in the northern hemisphere of the Red Planet, the 35 km-diameter Jezero Crater filled with water 3.6 billion years ago, making it an interesting site to search for traces of ancient life.

We expected the sedimentary rocks characteristic of ancient lakes, but they were actually igneous rocks

Olivier Peissac, CNRS Research Director at the Sorbonne University and co-author of this work

The published studies relate to the ground at the bottom of the crater, where the robot landed in February 2021, and they compile results from three instruments…