This image of a remnant of part of the delta rising out of the crater floor was taken with Perseverance’s Mastcam-Z camera February 22. Closer to homeĮven eroded outcrops close to Perseverance’s landing site look like they had a watery history. There are also individual large boulders cemented into the front of the scarp, suggesting that the region saw high floods, says Perseverance deputy project scientist Katie Stack Morgan of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, Calif. But already, the rover’s Remote Microscopic Imager camera is uncovering details that could reveal new insight into the crater’s watery past.įor example, the tilted layers of sedimentary rock and cementlike mixtures of coarse sand and pebbles in this rock feature, nicknamed “Delta Scarp,” confirm the delta’s wet history. The rover probably won’t reach that spot until sometime next year. Perseverance took this snapshot March 17 of a steep slope in a part of Jezero’s delta, from more than two kilometers away. JPL-Caltech/NASA, LANL, CNES, CNRS, ASU, MSSS The tilted layers of sedimentary rock (arrows) and other textures in this escarpment were probably formed by interaction between an ancient river and a lake. This picture, taken March 17, is a mosaic of five images taken with Perseverance’s Remote Microscopic Imager camera. The prospect of finding preserved lake floor sediments made the site good for searching for past life, one of the mission’s primary goals. Taking the long viewīefore the rover landed, the Perseverance team knew that Jezero crater looked like the dry basin of an ancient lake, with a river delta flowing into it. Here are some of the image highlights from the rover so far.
“It’s not as obvious as we thought,” Horgan says.
The rover’s landing site may include a volcanic lava flow from long ago, or signs of an earlier episode of water - or something else. Perseverance is getting views of enormous boulders that may have been transported by ancient floods, fine rock layers that look like they settled in calm waters, and rocks with large crystals that look volcanic.
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