All the things the Perseverance rover has achieved in its first year on Mars

By Georgina Torbet February 19, 2022

It’s been one year since NASA’s Perseverance rover made its remarkable landing on Mars. Twelve months on, NASA has shared a roundup of all the achievements the rover has made in its quest to understand the Jezero crater, where it landed, and in its quest to search for evidence of ancient life.

One of the rover’s major achievements was collecting samples of Mars rock, which proved tricky at first due to the rock being more crumbly than expected. However, despite the challenges the rover has managed to collect six samples so far which are sealed up in tubes and will be left on the planet’s surface for a future mission to collect and eventually bring back to Earth for study.

Martian hill called “Santa Cruz.” Boulders in the foreground are among the type of rocks the rover team has named “Ch’ał.” — Perseverance snapped this view of a hill called “Santa Cruz” on April 29, 2021. About 20 inches (50 centimeters) across on average, the boulders in the foreground are among the type of rocks the rover team has named “Ch’ał” (the Navajo term for “frog” and pronounced “chesh”). Perseverance will return to the area next week or so. NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS

“The samples Perseverance has been collecting will provide a key chronology for the formation of Jezero Crater,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, in a statement. “Each one is carefully considered for its scientific value.”

Recommended Videos

Another major milestone was achieved recently when Perseverance broke the record for the longest drive by a Mars rover in a single day. That record had stood for 17 years, set by the rover Opportunity, and Perseverance was able to best it by traveling 246 meters in a single Mars sol. The rover was helped in this by its AutoNav navigation software which uses maps of the Martian surface to plan out efficient driving routes.

The next challenge for the rover will be to collect two further rock samples from a set of dark rubbly rocks named “Ch’ał.” These could help to answer major open questions about the age of the Jezero crater, as current estimates are based on impact craters and scientists want a more accurate way to date the region.

“Right now, we take what we know about the age of impact craters on the Moon and extrapolate that to Mars,” said Katie Stack Morgan, Perseverance’s deputy project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, in a statement. “Bringing back a sample from this heavily cratered surface in Jezero could provide a tie-point to calibrate the Mars crater dating system independently, instead of relying solely on the lunar one.”

Topics

Georgina Torbet

Space Writer

Georgina has been the space writer at Digital Trends space writer for six years, covering human space exploration, planetary…

Space

Mars has ‘oceans’ worth’ of water – but it’s deep underground

More than 3 billion years ago, Mars was warm, wet, and had an atmosphere that could have supported life. This artist's rendering shows what the planet may have looked like with global oceans based on today's topography.

One of the key issues for getting humans to Mars is finding a way to get them water. Scientists know that millions of years ago, Mars was covered in oceans, but the planet lost its water over time and now has virtually no liquid water on its surface. Now, though, researchers have identified what they believe could be oceans' worth of water on Mars. There's just one snag: it's deep underground.

The research used data from NASA's now-retired InSight lander, which used a seismometer and other instruments to investigate the planet's interior. They found evidence of what appears to be a large underground reservoir of water, enough to cover the entire planet in about a mile of ocean. But it's inaccessible, being located between 7 to 13 miles beneath the planet's surface. The water is located in between cracks in a portion of the interior called the mid-crust, which sits beneath the dry upper crust that is drillable from the surface.

Space

Relive Mars rover’s ‘7 minutes of terror’ during landing 12 years ago

An animation showing the Curiosity spacecraft heading toward Mars.

At 1:31 a.m. ET on August 6, 2012, NASA’s Curiosity rover made a spectacular landing on the surface of Mars.

To mark the 12th anniversary, NASA has shared a video (below) in which members of the Curiosity team talk about how they achieved the remarkable feat, paying particular attention to the so-called “seven minutes of terror” during the final moments of descent.

Space

Perseverance rover finds tantalizing hints of possible ancient life on Mars

mars 2020 perseverance rover

NASA's Perseverance rover was sent to Mars with one big, ambitious aim: to see if life could ever have thrived on our neighboring planet. Although there's unlikely to be anything alive on Mars now, the planet was once similar to Earth, with a thicker atmosphere and plentiful water on its surface. And during this time, billions of years ago, microbial life could have survived there. Now, Perseverance has located some tantalizing indications of possible microbial life -- although it's too early for scientists to be sure.

The rover has been taking samples by drilling into the martian rock as it travels, and it's a recent sample from an area called the Cheyava Falls that has ignited interest. The rock, collected on July 21, has indications of chemical signatures and physical structures that could potentially have been formed by life, such as the presence of organic compounds. These carbon-based molecules are the building blocks of life; however, they can also be formed by other processes.