NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover captured this stunning image using its Left Mastcam-Z camera, which is actually a a pair of cameras located high on the rover’s mast. It’s currently traversing across the Jezero crater and exploring the Delta Front, which is campaign #2 of the mission. One of the major goals of this mission is seeking evidence of past life.
During this mission, it will be studying tjhe fine-grained clay-rich rocks in these environments, as they are some of the best at preserving ancient biomarkers. The latter refers to “molecular fossils,” or complex organic molecules created by life and preserved in rock for up to billions of years for certain molecular classes. Perseverance is also going to be drilling core samples that will eventually be returned to Earth where future scientists can analyze and hopefully, identify as well as extract organics. Even though Perseverance and China’s Zhurong rover probably won’t cross paths, they are each capturing never before seen footage of the Red Planet.
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Perseverance and the science and engineering teams are working together to pick the right rocks to core, using a suite of onboard instruments to understand mineralogy, elemental distributions, and detect whether organic molecules are present,” said NASA.
