An Update From the 2025 Mars 2020 Science Team Meeting
An overview of the annual meeting of the March 2020 scientific team
Written by Katie Stack Morgan, March 2020 Scientist of the actor project
The March 2020 scientific team met for a week in June to discuss recent scientific results, synthesize previous mission observations and discuss future plans for continuous exploration of the Jezero Crater edge. It was also an opportunity to celebrate what makes this mission so special: one of the most capable and sophisticated scientific missions ever sent to Mars, an experienced and expert scientific team and the many scientific achievements of the Rover in the past year.
We launched La Réunion, which was organized by our colleagues from the Rimfax team from Oslo University, emphasizing our most recent discoveries on the Rim Jezero Crater. A highlight was the team’s in -depth discussion on the spherules observed at Witch Hazel Hill, characteristics which probably provide us with the best chances of determining the origin of the crater rock sequence.
On the second day, we heard updates to the status of each team of scientific instruments. We then went to a session devoted to syntheses “on the scale of the crossing”. After 4.5 years of perseverance on Mars and more than 37 kilometers of driving (more than 23 miles), we are now able to analyze and integrate scientific data sets throughout the surface mission, in search of trends in space and time in the Jezero Rock record. Our team also organized a poster session, which was an excellent opportunity for scientific discussion in person and informal.
The team’s modern atmospheric and environmental surveys were frontal day 3. We then rewinded the clock, hearing new data analyzes acquired during the previous campaigns of persistence in the margin unit of Jezero, the soil of the crater and the Western fan. The last day of the meeting was entirely focused on the future plans of the Perseverance rover, including a discussion of our exploration and sampling strategy during the Crater Rim campaign. We have also looked further, considering where the rover could explore in the coming years.
After the meeting, the scientific team made a day trip to visit Gardnos Crater, a strongly eroded impact crater with excellent examples of impact merger and filling of post-mumping sediments. The team visit to Gardnos offered a unique opportunity to see and study the rock units generated by the impact like those expected on the edge of the Jezero crater and to discuss the challenges that we have recognized as similar units with the Rover on Mars. Recaping on our Perseverance team meetings was one of my favorite annual traditions (see summaries of our 2022, 2023 and 2024 meetings) and I can’t wait to report in a year. While the Perseverance team takes up challenges of the coming year, we can take inspiration from one of the biggest polar explorers in Norway, Nansen Fridtjof, who said while delivering its Nobel conference, “the difficult is what can be done immediately; the impossible is what takes a little more time.”
