While Curiosity is exploring Mount Sharp, NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover is busy traversing Jezero Crater’s ‘Yori Pass’, where it stumbled upon an unusual sandstone piece with veins of lighter material inside. These fine grains are thought to have been carried from elsewhere by water before settling and forming stone.
Once Perseverance finishes collecting samples from Yori Pass, the rover will drive 745 feet (227 meters) southeast to a mega sand ripple. This area is located in the middle of a small dune field, called “Observation Mountain”, where the rover is set to gather its first samples of regolith, or crushed rock and dust. It will help Perseverance fulfill a key objective, which is astrobiology.
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We often prioritize study of fine-grained sedimentary rocks like this one in our search for organics and potential biosignatures. What’s especially interesting about the Yori Pass outcrop is that it is laterally equivalent with ‘Hogwallow Flats,’ where we found very fine-grained sedimentary rocks. That means that the rock bed is located at the same elevation as Hogwallow, and has a large, traceable footprint visible on the surface,” said Katie Stack Morgan, Perseverance deputy project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
