After a long, arduous climb, NASA’s Perseverance rover reached the top of Jezero Crater’s rim in December 2024.
It took the rover three and a half months to vertically ascend 500 metres (1,640ft), at times creeping up slopes with a 20% gradient, emerging in a region known as Lookout Hill.
"Our rover drivers have done an amazing job negotiating some of the toughest terrain we’ve encountered since landing," says Steven Lee, Perseverance’s deputy project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
"They developed innovative approaches to overcome these challenges – even tried driving backward to see if it would help – and the rover has come through it all like a champ."
Perseverance is now set to begin its fifth science campaign, dubbed ‘Northern Rim’.
Over the next year, it will traverse around 6.4km (4 miles), visiting four sites of geological interest to take measurements and collect samples to add to the cache already taken from within the crater, with the hope of later returning them to Earth for study.
"The Northern Rim campaign brings us completely new scientific riches as Perseverance roves into fundamentally new geology," says Ken Farley, project scientist for Perseverance at Caltech.
"It marks our transition from rocks that partially filled Jezero Crater when it was formed by a massive impact about 3.9 billion years ago to rocks from deep down inside Mars that were thrown upward to form the crater rim after impact."
Perseverance now has a golden opportunity to study geology usually hidden deep beneath the planet’s surface.
The rover will initially head to a layered rocky outcrop around 450 metres (1,500ft) away, called Witch Hazel Hill.
"The campaign starts off with a bang because Witch Hazel Hill represents over 100 metres (330ft) of layered outcrop, where each layer is like a page in the book of Martian history.
"As we drive down the hill, we will be going back in time," says Candice Bedford, a Perseverance scientist from Purdue University.
Bringing a bit of Mars home
Words: Chris Lintott
Perseverance carries with it a well-travelled fragment of rock – a tiny sliver of a meteorite recovered from the deserts of Oman 25 years ago, SaU008, which seems to have come from Mars.
By taking a bit of Mars that we’ve prodded in terrestrial labs back to the Red Planet, it’s possible to calibrate the data the mission sends back home.
It also seems to me to be a symbol, a piece of a planet lost billions of years ago, now returned home as part of a mission to understand the history of this very alien place.
Perseverance’s aim is to return the favour, gathering samples that might one day be brought back to Earth; whether funding will allow this remains to be seen.
Fingers crossed.
