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In a significant development yesterday, on December 12, National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Perseverance Rover, which has been collecting information on Mars for the last four years, has now climbed on top of a crater’s rim.
The rover’s ascent is significant because it will now be exposed to rocks that existed in their present form much before asteroids collided with the Martian surface.
The craters thus formed resulted in the original Martial rocks having been alleviated to higher altitude on the periphery of these craters.
“The Northern Rim campaign brings us completely new scientific riches as Perseverance roves into fundamentally new geology,” said Ken Farley, project scientist for Perseverance at Caltech in Pasadena.
“It marks our transition from rocks that partially filled Jezero Crater when it was formed by a massive impact about 3.9 billion years ago to rocks from deep down inside Mars that were thrown upward to form the crater rim after impact,” the scientist added.
It is important to mention that these rocks on top of these craters not only represent pieces of early Martian crust but are also among the oldest rocks found anywhere in the solar system.
“Investigating them could help us understand what Mars — and our own planet — may have looked like in the beginning,” Farley explained.
The possibility of extraterrestrial life or ‘aliens’ has both enticed and appalled human imagination. Astronomically, Mars is considered to be the planet whose temperatures and overall atmosphere could support some form of life.
In order to get some clarity on these possibilities, a key objective of Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology which includes collecting samples that may contain signs of ancient microbial life.
“The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, to help pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet and as the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith [ layer of loose, broken rock, dust, and other materials that covers the surface of solid rock on planets and moons],” a press statement by NASA mentioned.
It is important to mention that the samples collected by Perseverance will be brought back to Earth by NASA’s Mars Sample Return Program, which is designed in cooperation with the European Space Agency.
This particular programme is designed to send a spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.