NASA’s Perseverance Is Finally Leaving the Mars Crater It’s Inhabited for Years [CNET]

The plucky little Mars rover has spent the last 3.5 years collecting samples from the bottom of a crater, and it’s ready to move up to bigger things.

NASA’s Mars rover has had just about enough of hanging out at the bottom of a crater. The six-wheeled Perseverance rover has begun its ascent to break out of its confines and has quite a way to go. Once it gets to the top, it will celebrate its freedom from the crater’s clutches by collecting more rock samples.

Perseverance has spent the last three and a half years at the bottom of the Jezero Crater. Since that’s where Perseverance landed when it initially got to Mars, it’s the only home the rover has ever known. 

Since its landing, it has dutifully collected rock samples and sent home amazing images from our red neighbor, including this butt-crack rock.

With its job done inside of the crater, the rover is on its way up to the rim. It’s journey up and out is not without dangers. NASA says that Perseverance will climb 1,000 feet (305 meters) while facing terrain that is upwards of 23-degree slopes. NASA says that rover operators try to avoid slopes that tilt Perseverance more than 30 degrees. It has already traveled 18 unpaved miles, and NASA says that the bot is in excellent condition and should make the journey without hassle.

Perseverance will take a winding route to avoid the biggest obstacles

It’s easy enough to imagine a rover slowly but steadily climbing a big hill to get to the top. However, Perseverance’s path is a little more complex than that. The bot will weave its way around the crater in order to avoid the most challenging obstacles. Per NASA, the path will be handled by Perseverance’s auto-navigation capabilities to follow a route programmed by the rover’s handlers. 

The reason the rover is heading up there is to collect more rock samples. Samples collected at the bottom of the crater represent some of the oldest rocks on the planet and give scientists more data about what Mars was like in its earlier years. The top of the crater has younger rocks that’ll tell scientists more about things like whether Mars had water and for how long, and whether anything lived there when there was water. 

“Among these rock cores are likely the oldest materials sampled from any known environment that was potentially habitable,” said Tanja Bosak, a geobiologist at MIT in Cambridge and member of Perseverance’s science team. “When we bring them back to Earth, they can tell us so much about when, why and for how long Mars contained liquid water and whether some organic, prebiotic and potentially even biological evolution may have taken place on that planet.”

NASA expects Perseverance’s trek to be done by the end of the year, so as you go about your daily business, remember there’s a little robot making a big climb on Mars for the sake of scientific research.