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

By Georgina Torbet Published April 28, 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

Check out this incredible cloud atlas of Mars

Arsia Mons Elongated Cloud (AMEC): This elongated cloud has formed as a result of wind encountering the Arsia Mons mountains. It forms almost every day during a specific season, from early morning until noon.

Photographing a beautiful sky is a great passion for many here on Earth, but it can be just as striking on another planet too. Researchers recently presented a stunning new "cloud atlas" of Mars: a database containing 20 years' worth of images of clouds and storms observed on the red planet.

The cloud atlas is available online, inviting you to browse the many images of martian weather captured by the Mars Express spacecraft. This European Space Agency mission has been in orbit around Mars since 2005, and has taken hundreds of images of the planet using its High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) instrument.

Space

Perseverance rover gears up for a big climb to the rim of the Jezero Crater

One of the navigation cameras aboard NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover captured this view looking back at the “Bright Angel” area on July 30, the 1,224th Martian day, or sol, of the mission.

The Perseverance rover on Mars is set to begin its newest challenge: a slog up the rim of the Jezero Crater that will take months to complete. The rover will face steep slopes and difficult terrain, testing its wheels and suspension system, but its efforts should help to uncover rocks from the most ancient part of the Mars crust.

Since the rover landed in the Jezero Crater in 2021, it has been exploring the floor of the crater and the site of an ancient river delta. This area was chosen because it was once home to an ancient lake, so the rock cores that the rover has collected will help to uncover information about the history of water on Mars -- which is vital to determine if the planet could ever have been habitable.

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.