Tag: Jezero Crater

Click for wide shot. The original of the inset
can be found here.

In their exploration of the outer flanks of the rim of Jezero Crater, the science team operating the Perseverance rover have discovered an unusual rock different than everything around it, appearing to be made of many very tiny spherules.

The picture to the right illustrates this. The wider picture was taken by Perseverance’s left high resolution camera, with the inset a close-up mosaic of three images taken by the rover’s micro-imager, designed to get very very high resolution pictures of small objects. From the press release:

The rock, named “St. Pauls Bay” by the team, appeared to be comprised of hundreds of millimeter-sized, dark gray spheres. Some of these occurred as more elongate, elliptical shapes, while others possessed angular edges, perhaps representing broken spherule fragments. Some spheres even possessed tiny pinholes! What quirk of geology could produce these strange shapes?

This isn’t the first time strange spheres have been spotted on Mars. In 2004, the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity spotted so-called, “Martian Blueberries” at Meridiani Planum, and since then, the Curiosity rover has observed spherules in the rocks of Yellowknife Bay at Gale crater. Just a few months ago, Perseverance itself also spied popcorn-like textures in sedimentary rocks exposed in the Jezero crater inlet channel, Neretva Vallis. In each of these cases, the spherules were interpreted as concretions, features that formed by interaction with groundwater circulating through pore spaces in the rock.

Not all spherules form this way, however. They also form on Earth by rapid cooling of molten rock droplets formed in a volcanic eruption, for instance, or by the condensation of rock vaporized by a meteorite impact.

At the moment the science team has no idea which of these theories explains the spherules. That the rock is located on the crater rim, where ejecta from the impact will be found, strongly suggests the impact was the cause, not groundwater flow.

Click for full resolution annotated image. Click here for unannotated full resolution image.

Cool image time! The panorama above, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was assembled from 44 pictures taken by the rover Perseverance on September 27, 2024 as it began its climb up the rim of Jezero Crater. If you click on it you can see the full resolution image that is also annotated to identify features within the crater as well as places where Perseverance has traveled.

The overview map below, with the blue dot showing the rover’s location when this panorama was taken. The yellow lines indicate the area covered by the panorama, with the arrow indicating the direction.

Click for interactive map.

According to the information at the link, the rover has been experiencing some slippery sandy ground as it has been climbing.
» Read more

Click for full resolution. The original images can be found here and here.

Cool image time! The panorama above was created by me from two pictures taken today by the left navigation camera on the Mars rover Perseverance (found here and here). The haziness in the air is the left over from a local dust storm in Jezero Crater during the past month.

On the overview map below, the blue dot marks Perseverance’s present position, with the red dotted line indicating the approximate planned route of the rover uphill. The yellow lines are my guess as to the area covered by the panorama above. That guess could be wrong, as not all the features in the picture match the overview map. The view could be much closer, with the hill and ridgeline nothing more than the small outcrops close to the rover.

Nonetheless, these navigation pictures show us the kind of terrain the rover will be climbing as it works its way up the rim of Jezero Crater. The ground is relative smooth, though steep. My guess is that this is about a 25% grade, which on Earth would be a problem but on Mars it is a grade that NASA’s other rover, Curiosity, has routinely traversed. Perseverance has not yet traveled this kind of steepness, but there is no reason to expect it to have any difficulties doing so.

Click for interactive map.

Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on September 13, 2024 by one of the high resolution cameras on the Mars rover Perseverance. The rock’s striped nature makes it unique, unlike any feature spotted by any rover previously. From an update today:

The science team thinks that this rock has a texture unlike any seen in Jezero Crater before, and perhaps all of Mars. Our knowledge of its chemical composition is limited, but early interpretations are that igneous and/or metamorphic processes could have created its stripes. Since Freya Castle [the name the science team gave the rock] is a loose stone that is clearly different from the underlying bedrock, it has likely arrived here from someplace else, perhaps having rolled downhill from a source higher up. This possibility has us excited, and we hope that as we continue to drive uphill, Perseverance will encounter an outcrop of this new rock type so that more detailed measurements can be acquired.

Without doubt the rock’s rounded surface suggests it was ground smooth by either water or ice. That surface certainly resembles glacial cobble seen across the northeast of the U.S. where ice glaciers once covered the entire landscape. The rock also resembles river cobble, smoothed by flowing water.

The stripes however suggest that prior to its being smoothed, this rock underwent a much more complex geological process, whereby two different materials were intermixed and squeezed together.

Click for full resolution. For original images, go here, here, here, and here.

Click for interactive map.

Cool image time. The panorama above was created from four pictures taken on June 10, 2024 by the left navigation camera on the Mars rover Perseverance (captions found here, here, here, and here). It looks north at the nearest hill that forms the north part of the rim of Jezero Crater.

The overview map to the right provides context. The blue dot marks Perseverance’s present location, when it took these pictures. The yellow lines indicate the approximate area covered by the panorama. The red dotted line marks the rover’s planned route, while the white dotted line the route it has actually taken.

Because the rover is now at the base of this hill, it can no longer see the top of the crater’s rim. What it sees instead is the barren foothills of that rim, covered with dust, dunes, and many broken rocks.

As I have noted numerous times, the utter lack of life marks this as a truly alien landscape, compared to Earth. Nowhere on our home planet would you see terrain this empty of life. While NASA likes to claim that Perseverance’s main mission is the search for life on Mars, that claim is always a lie. It is very unlikely any life is going to be found here by Perseverance, and if that was its true scientific purpose it would never have been built nor launched.

What the scientists are doing is studying the alien geology of Mars, to try to understand how this utterly alien planet got to be the way it is now. Such knowledge is critical for the future explorers of space, as it will make it easier for them to understand the alien landscapes they will find elsewhere, within the solar system and eventually in other solar systems far beyond.

Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on April 13, 2024 by the high resolution camera on the Mars rover Perseverance.

The largest rock in the picture is probably only one or a few feet or so across. It has two holes, one very visible in the center and a second less obvious in the shadow on the right. What makes the obvious hole most intriguing is that it appears it was formerly entirely enclosed by the boulder, and was exposed when a section broke off. That section is the smaller rock in the foreground. I wonder if the Perseverance team will bring the rover around to get a view of that smaller rock, to see if it has its own corresponding part of this hole.

Note the smoothness of the rocks. This smoothness is very similar to what Curiosity saw when it was either on the floor of Gale Crater, or at the base of Mount Sharp. In both cases that smoothness suggests either flowing water or glacial ice erosion, like the smooth cobbles one routinely finds in streambeds or in the moraines of glaciers.

As Curiosity climbed Mount Sharp the smoothness was replaced with a delicate flaky fleecework indicating many layers but little violent erosion capable of smoothing the surface (see for example the images here and here). It appears Perseverance is still low enough in Jezero Crater to be within the ancient active region, formed from flowing water or ice.

As for the holes, my guess is that this rock formed from lava, and the holes are what geologists call “vugs”, bubbles formed within the lava as it solidified.