NASA’s Perseverance rover has embarked on an ambitious road trip on Mars
NASA’s Perseverance rover has embarked on an ambitious road trip on Mars A road trip has begun on Mars. NASA’s Perseverance rover, which has been roaming the red planet since 2021, has embarked on a long trek to the top of the crater in which it landed, the space agency said Tuesday. It marks a new chapter of the rover’s mission: It’s expected to spend the next few months making a steep ascent up to the western rim of Jezero Crater, a 28-mile-wide basin north of the Martian equator that scientists think was once home to a river delta. The trip comes after 3½ years of exploration on the floor of Jezero Crater, where Perseverance found evidence of ancient flash floods and collected several rock samples that NASA intends to bring bac k to Earth on a future mission. Perseverance has completed four science campaigns, collected 22 rock cores, and traveled over 18 unpaved miles,” Art Thompson, the mission’s project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labor...