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It will lay them down in one or more places for future missions to retrieve, in what could be the first sample return from Mars. Pressure mountsĪll told, Perseverance is supposed to collect at least 30 rock, dirt and atmosphere samples. They might even - as reported at a December meeting of the American Geophysical Union by Eva Scheller, a geologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena - contain organic molecules, probably produced through non-biological processes, such as those seen in some Martian meteorites. The Seitah rocks, like the Maaz rocks, also show signs of having interacted with water in the past. Olivine crystals would have formed first, and sunk towards the bottom of the cooling magma, and then pyroxene would have formed around them - creating layered rocks that appear sedimentary. That’s strong evidence that the Seitah rocks formed as a large body of molten rock cooled, says Stack Morgan. These minerals are generally found in igneous rocks or volcanic areas on Earth. Using various instruments to analyse the rocks’ chemical composition, Perseverance found chunky grains of one mineral, called olivine, encased in another, called pyroxene. Mars helicopter kicks up ‘cool’ dust clouds - and unexpected science But as soon as Perseverance ground away at some of the Seitah rocks, another surprise emerged.
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(It collects pairs to increase the potential that one of the samples will be returned to Earth.) Mission scientists had thought that Seitah’s rocks would be sedimentary, because visually they seemed to be composed of different layers. The rover then drove south and west, skirting a dune-ridden area called Seitah, and collected two more pairs of samples. This rock formation, called Maaz, covers much of Jezero’s floor. “Mars gives you what it wants to give you.”Ī month later, Perseverance successfully drilled its first pair of cores, into a similar igneous rock that had been altered by water (see ‘Sampling Mars’). “You can’t really give Mars a wish list,” says Tanja Bosak, a geobiologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Perseverance collected its sixth rock core (shown here, held in the rover's sampling mechanism) last month. Because the sampling procedure was automated, the rover ended up with an empty but sealed tube, which mission scientists tried to put a positive spin on, labelling it a sample of Mars’s atmosphere. “Those are ideal places to be looking for signs of ancient rock-hosted life.”īut when Perseverance tried to drill a core, the material crumbled and slid out of the sampling device. “That was a great moment for the mission,” says Stack Morgan. That meant the rover was looking at an ancient volcanic rock that had interacted with water, indicating a life-friendly environment such as had never been seen on Mars. It looked like an igneous rock on Earth that had salt-rimmed holes in it - holes that had probably formed as water flowed through the rock. Exploring the area’s geology, Perseverance ground into a piece of Martian rock to reveal a fresh surface. Scientists discovered that Jezero’s floor wasn’t what they expected when the rover began preparing to drill its first sample in August. “Jezero delivered,” says Katie Stack Morgan, the mission’s deputy project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. If and when Perseverance’s samples come back to Earth, researchers will be able to date rocks from specific places on the surface of Mars for the first time.īefore the rover landed, mission scientists didn’t know they were going to hit an igneous jackpot. Igneous rocks are important because scientists can analyse the radioactive decay of elements inside them to determine how old the rocks are. But the rover found a different history for the landscape. Some researchers had thought that the crater floor would be made of sedimentary rock, created as wind or water deposited layers of sediment over time. These formed as molten rock cooled and solidified billions of years ago. Instead, Perseverance has spent the year rolling around the bottom of the crater, making a host of surprising discoveries - one of which is that Jezero’s floor is made of igneous rocks.