Bryony Hogan anticipates some of the oldest rocks as NASA mission prepares to emerge from Jezero Crater
Bryony Hogan, a planetary scientist at Purdue University, said Mars research is gaining momentum as NASA’s Mars rover Perseverance nears the exit of Jezero Crater, leading to opportunities to study new areas of the Martian landscape. approaching the stage. (Purdue University/Brian Powell)
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — NASA’s Mars 2020 mission and Purdue University planetary scientist Bryony Hogan mark a new stage in the search for details about Mars’ history and the possibility that it once hosted life. There is.
The mission’s rover, Perseverance, is just weeks away from leaving the 45-mile-wide Jezero Crater to explore new terrain. This is the point of the mission that Hogan set after the rover landed in the crater four years ago.
“The rim of the crater is like the edge of the world, and it feels like we’re about to cross the edge,” said Perseverance co-investigator and long-term planner and professor of planetary science. said Hogan. Faculty of Science. “For the first time, we will see some of the oldest rocks we will see on this mission. They are more than 4 billion years old and were excavated from the deep crust of Mars by this impact crater. I was exposed.”
Bryony Hogan, a planetary scientist at Purdue University, says Earth’s rocks provide only partial historical data. She sees every rock on Mars as a time capsule, potentially containing information from billions of years ago about the history of environmental conditions on Earth.
Perseverance will climb a small mountain range, cresting the crater rim about a half-mile vertically from its original landing site. If the spacecraft passes over the top of the crater and descends on the other side, it could potentially access additional areas of the Red Planet’s rock and terrain for missions.
To Hogan, every rock on Mars is like a time capsule, containing information from billions of years ago that could help answer questions about the potential for microbial life and the history of environmental conditions on Earth. It may have been. Finding evidence of microbial life, even billions of years old, could open the door to new research in understanding how common simple life forms are in the universe. It will be.
The Mars rover’s crater exit is the latest phase of a mission that began with a July 2020 launch and 300 million mile journey into space. The rover successfully landed in Jezero Crater, just north of Mars’ equator, in February 2021. The crater once contained a lake the size of two Lake Tahoes. Before the rover’s launch, Hogan led a study of the mineralogy of the site, which produced one of the results that contributed to the selection of Jezero Crater for the mission.
Hogan’s involvement with NASA’s Perseverance spacecraft mission extends beyond planetary science research. She helped design Mastcam-Z, part of the rover’s camera system that can record images in color, 3D, and video. It also has a zoom feature powerful enough to see houseflies at the far end of a soccer field.
The car-sized Perseverance and mission team members roll over the edge of a crater to explore the wide-open Isidis Planum, an ancient basin formed by a much larger impact some 4 billion years ago. This will be the first time we see an impact basin. It is intersected by riverbeds, including rivers that feed the lakes of Jezero Crater. Some of the rocks exposed in the basin are older than Jezero Crater itself.
“Rocks this old are extremely rare on Earth,” Hogan said. “They were eroded or destroyed by plate tectonics and water. So this is a great chance to find out what the building blocks of Earth-like planets are like.”
Hogan said he was excited about the age of the rocks, which may have come from deep in Mars’ upper mantle, pushed to the surface by the impacts that formed Jezero Crater and the Isidis Planum Basin. Hydrothermal environments may have been formed by water and heat within larger impact basins, allowing warm water to migrate through cracks in the rocks, providing a perfect opportunity for life to survive if it were to arise on Mars.
Hogan described where the rover will go after it leaves Jezero Crater as a “moving target.” Plans for the samples collected by Perseverance could determine whether the rover remains on Jezero’s rim or descends into the crater itself. More specific plans for future sample return missions could be announced by early next year.
“We know that whatever happens, it will give us time to explore the crater rim and obtain additional very interesting ancient samples,” she said.
The series of samples collected by the Mars rover could reveal details about the Red Planet itself, from its history to potential keys to the formation of the planet and its habitable environment. Hogan said some of the samples provide insight into how water interacts with different types of rocks and minerals, capturing potential biosignatures that could have been formed by life. He said it was possible.
Perseverance’s discoveries this year shatter the stereotype that Mars is a dusty red planet. Fields of blue volcanic basalt rocks and unique black-and-white zebra-striped rocks were among the reveals on Mars earlier this year. Hogan said the rock is an example of a strange crustal rock and is different from what the rover found in Jezero Crater.
As of late November, the rover had traveled nearly 20 1/2 miles and collected 25 rock and regolith samples and one air sample.
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