Life at Jezero Crater

As for any consensus among scientists that signs of past or present life have been seen by Perseverance, once again, don't wait for a slam dunk observation.

Depiction shows Jezero Crater — the landing locale of the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover — as it might have appeared billions of years ago when it was perhaps a life-sustaining lake. An inlet and outlet are also visible on either side of the lake. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Since its wheels-down landing in February of last year, NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has been busily at work, on the prowl steering itself across the Jezero Crater landscape.


A key duty of the robot is to search for signs of ancient microbial life. The Mars machinery is industriously gathering up samples of Martian rock and soil that could help tease out an answer concerning the past habitability of the Red Planet.


Perseverance is on a roll, a collectible outing to stash core samples in sealed tubes that are to eventually find their way to Earth via the Mars Sample Return program.

But how tough is it to spot and sample potential past life on Mars? Perhaps the rover already has? Then there's the question of whether we need the samples back on Earth to find signs of past life, or can Perseverance, on-location, detect past or even present life with its suite of instruments?


Above all, just how hard might it be to have a consensus among scientists that, yes, signs of life, be it past or present has been observed by the rover? What's a slam dunk finding look like?  READ MORE...

Death Spiraling Moon

Mars' moon Phobos crosses the face of the sun, captured by NASA’s Perseverance rover with its Mastcam-Z camera. The faint black specks to the bottom left are sunspots. 

(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS/SSI)

NASA’s Perseverance rover has captured the clearest ever footage of a solar eclipse over Mars, and the results are out of this world.

The rover snapped the ethereal video of Mars’ potato-shaped moon, Phobos, moving across the face of the sun on April 2. During the eclipse, Phobos projected its uneven shadow over the Martian surface — appearing almost as though it was the pupil of a gigantic eyeball rolling in its socket.

Perseverance recorded the footage midway through its journey to a river delta on Mars’ 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) Jezero Crater, where it will search for evidence of life on the Red Planet. Training its state-of-the-art Mastcam-Z camera on the sky, the rover recorded the misshapen moon’s solar transit with the greatest zoom and at the highest framerate ever.

"I knew it was going to be good, but I didn't expect it to be this amazing," Rachel Howson, a mission operations specialist at Malin Space Science Systems and one of the Mastcam-Z team members who operates the camera, said in a statement.

Phobos, named after the Greek god of fear, is roughly 157 times smaller than Earth's moon and is one of Mars' two natural satellites, alongside the even smaller Deimos (whose name comes from the Greek god of dread).

Scientists believe that the brother moons were once roaming asteroids that were snared into Mars’ orbit by the planet’s gravitational field. The orbits of these captive asteroids are unstable, according to researchers, and scientists predict that in a few tens of millions of years' time Deimos will spin out into space while Phobos will slam into Mars’ surface.  READ MORE...

An Oasis Found

Millions of miles away, on the surface of Mars, inside an enormous crater, a little NASA rover is taking some pictures. The view is quite stunning there—miles of undisturbed cinnamon terrain scattered with pebbles and boulders, with silky dunes where the craggy bedrock doesn’t peek through. But when the rover, named Perseverance, sent the photos back home from the crater, known as Jezero, scientists saw something more.

© NASA / JPL-Caltech

The arrangement of the sediment? It resembled a certain familiar landscape on Earth. Those boulders? A strong current had carried them in. Jezero, scientists could now see, wasn’t always dry and desolate. It was once a lake. The Perseverance rover was roaming what used to be a delta, where a small river met calm waters. A few billion years ago, the ground beneath its tires might have been sloshing with water.

On Earth, when a river pours into a lake, it carries grains of silt with it. Over time, that sediment builds up in layers that fan out from a narrow point where the running water meets the still. Observations from previous spacecraft missions, orbiting Mars from above, had shown something similar on the red planet’s surface, so scientists already suspected that Jezero crater, formed after a meteor impact, had been filled in with water. But they couldn’t be sure until Perseverance was there, snapping pictures like a mesmerized tourist. Here was history, the ancient ruins of Mars. The rover had looked out across the quiet terrain and observed not a barren wasteland, but a lost oasis.  TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...