NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover Ready to Roll for Miles in Years Ahead
After nearly five years on Mars, NASA’s Perseverance rover has traveled nearly 25 miles, and the mission team has been busy testing the rover’s durability and collecting new scientific discoveries en route to a new region dubbed “Lake Charms,” where they will search for rocks to sample in the coming year.
Like its predecessor Curiosity, which has been exploring another region of Mars since 2012, Perseverance was designed for the long term. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which built Perseverance and is leading the mission, has continued to test the rover’s parts here on Earth to ensure the six-wheeled scientist will be strong for years to come. Last summer, JPL certified that the rotary actuators that turn the rover’s wheels can operate optimally for at least another 60 miles; Comparable braking tests are also underway.
Over the past two years, engineers have thoroughly evaluated almost all of the vehicle’s subsystems, concluding that they will be able to operate at least until 2031.
“These tests show that the rover is in excellent condition,” said Steve Lee, JPL deputy project manager, who presented the results Wednesday at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, the largest gathering of planetary scientists in the United States. “All systems are fully capable of supporting a very long-term mission to explore in depth this fascinating region of Mars.”
Perseverance traveled through Jezero Crater on Mars, the site of an ancient system of lakes and rivers, where it collected scientifically compelling rock core samples. In fact, in September, the team announced that a sample from a rock nicknamed “Cheyava Falls” contained a potential fingerprint of past microbial life.
In addition to an extensive suite of six science instruments, Perseverance offers more autonomous capabilities than older rovers. A recent article published in IEEE Transactions on Field Robotics highlights an autonomous planning tool called Enhanced Autonomous Navigation, or ENav. The software scans for potential hazards up to 50 feet (15 meters) away, then chooses an obstacle-free path and tells Perseverance’s wheels how to navigate it.
JPL engineers meticulously plan the rover’s activities on Mars every day. But once the rover starts rolling, it fends for itself and sometimes has to react to unexpected obstacles in the terrain. Older rovers could do this to some extent, but not if these obstacles were grouped next to each other. They also couldn’t react as far in advance, causing vehicles to drive more slowly when approaching sand pits, rocks, and ledges. In contrast, ENav’s algorithm evaluates each wheel of the rover independently based on terrain elevation, trade-offs between different routes, and “keep” or “keep out” areas marked by human operators for the path to follow.
“More than 90 percent of Perseverance’s journey relies on autonomous driving, enabling rapid collection of a diverse range of samples,” said Hiro Ono, an autonomy researcher at JPL and lead author of the paper. “As humans travel to the Moon and even Mars in the future, long-range autonomous driving will become more essential for exploring these worlds.”
A paper published Wednesday in Science details what Perseverance discovered in the “Margin Unit,” a geological area located at the margin, or inner rim, of Jezero Crater. The rover collected three samples from this region. Scientists believe these samples could be particularly useful in showing how ancient rocks from Mars’ deep interior interacted with water and the atmosphere, helping to create conditions suitable for life.
From September 2023 to November 2024, Perseverance climbed 400 meters of the Margin Unit, studying rocks along the way, particularly those containing the mineral olivine. Scientists use minerals as timekeepers because the crystals they contain can record details of the precise time and conditions under which they formed.
Jezero Crater and the surrounding area contain significant reserves of olivine, which forms at high temperatures, usually deep within a planet, and offers insight into what was happening inside the planet. Scientists believe the Margin Unit’s olivine was created during intrusion, a process by which magma penetrates underground layers and cools into igneous rock. In this case, erosion then exposed this rock to the surface, where it could interact with water from the ancient crater lake and carbon dioxide, which was abundant in the planet’s early atmosphere.
These interactions form new minerals called carbonates, which can preserve signs of past life, as well as clues about how Mars’ atmosphere has changed over time.
“This combination of olivine and carbonate was a major factor in the choice to land at Jezero Crater,” said lead author of the new paper, Ken Williford, a member of the Perseverance science team at the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science in Seattle. “These minerals are powerful recorders of planetary evolution and the potential for life.”
Together, the olivine and carbonates record the interaction between rock, water and atmosphere inside the crater, including how each changed over time. The olivine in the Margin Unit appears to have been altered by water at the base of the unit, where it would have been submerged. But as perseverance increased, the olivine showed textures associated with magma chambers, such as crystallization, and fewer signs of water alteration.
As Perseverance leaves the margin unit for Lake Charmes, the team will have the chance to collect new olivine-rich samples and compare the differences between the two areas.
Managed for NASA by Caltech, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover on behalf of the agency’s Science Mission Directorate as part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program portfolio.
To learn more about perseverance, visit:
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/mars-2020-perseverance
Contacts with news media
Andrew Good / DC Agle
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.
818-393-2433 / 818-393-9011
andrew.c.good@jpl.nasa.gov / agle@jpl.nasa.gov
Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
NASA Headquarters, Washington
240-285-5155 / 240-419-1732
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov
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