NASA’s Perseverance Rover has left Mount Washburn behind and arrived at its next destination, Bright Angel.
There she discovered an unusual type of rock that scientists call ‘popcorn rock’. The peculiar stone is further evidence that water was once present in the Jezero crater.
The Perseverance mission focuses on life on ancient Mars. Along with the search for fossilized evidence of ancient life is the search and effort to understand the environments that could have supported life.
Therefore, there is a lake in the crater, an ancient paleolake with a delta of sediments and other interesting geological features.
On Sol 1175 of her mission, Perseverance arrived at Bright Angel, an area of ​​scientific interest that is part of a river channel that empties into Lake Crater.
Bright Angel is known for bright rock outcrops that are either ancient sediments that filled the channel or much older rocks that the river exposed.
The image below shows the rover’s path leading to Bright Angel. The white part shows where Perseverance passed parallel to the Neretva Vallis river channel, and the blue part shows where it passed through the channel.
Bright Angel rocks are clearly visible.
As Perseverance made its way to Bright Angel, mission personnel saw bright rocks in the distance. But the path to the new goal was not easy. The rover encountered a boulder field that proved so challenging that the operators changed course.
“We started paralleling the channel in late January and were making pretty good progress, but then the boulders got bigger and more numerous,” said Evan Graser, associate director of strategic planning for Perseverance’s routes at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
“What was an average of over a hundred meters per Martian day was reduced to just tens of meters. It was frustrating.”
Endurance has two modes of travel. In rougher terrain, the route planning team uses imagery to plan the rover’s route approximately 30 meters at a time. To travel further than that in a single solo, the team relies on Perseverance’s autopilot mode, called AutoNav.
But as the journey through the boulder field became more difficult, AutoNav struggled. Sometimes it just stopped, which is the safest option. But that means the journey to Bright Angel took a lot longer than expected.
“As we went, we followed the river channel to the north, hoping to find a section where the dunes were small and far enough apart that the rover could drive between them — because dunes are known to eat up Mars rovers,” Graser said. .
“The Endurance also needed an entry ramp that we could safely drive down. When the imagery showed both, we made a beeline for it.”
The rover was rerouted across a dune field and across a river channel, shortening its journey by several weeks.
Endurance is nearing the end of its fourth science phase. He is looking for carbonate rocks and olivine in the Margin Unit, which is along the inside of the Jezero crater rim. But in Bright Angel he hoped to find different stones.
That’s exactly what happened.
According to a NASA press release, geologists were mesmerized by what they saw. Some of the rocks are thickly strewn with spheres, earning them the name “popcorn rocks.”
The rocks are also full of ridges that look like mineral veins. Mineral veins form when water transports minerals through rock and deposits them.
Mineral veins are common on wet, watery Earth, and the rover has spotted them elsewhere on Mars.
Popcorn elements could also be water proof. Like mineral veins, they indicate that water flowed through these rocks.
The next step is to determine what minerals are present in these popcorn rocks. Stamina will work its way up to Bright Angel and be measured continuously.
Over the weekend he will use his abrasion tool and other tools to get an even closer look. He vaporizes some of the rock and uses his SuperCam toolkit to examine the rock’s chemistry.
The decision to collect a sample for eventual return to Earth (hopefully) will rest on these results.
Once Perseverance finishes at Bright Angel, the rover will head south again, across the Neretva Vallis, to its next destination: the Serpentine Rapids.
This article was originally published by Universe Today. Read the original article.