On Mars, a Year of Surprise and Discovery
Excerpt: ...NASA’s Perseverance rover ...On Feb. 18 last year, the spacecraft carrying the rover pierced the Martian atmosphere at 13,000 miles per hour. ...Twelve months later, Perseverance is nestled within a 28-mile-wide crater known as Jezero. From the topography, it is evident that more than three billion years ago, Jezero was a body of water roughly the size of Lake Tahoe, with rivers flowing in from the west and out to the east. One of the first things Perseverance did was deploy Ingenuity, a small robotic helicopter and the first such flying machine to take off on another planet. Perseverance also demonstrated a technology for generating oxygen that will be crucial whenever astronauts finally make it to Mars. The rover then set off on a diversion from the original exploration plans, to study the floor of the crater it landed in. ...collect cores of rock — cylinders about the size of sticks of chalk — that are eventually to be brought back to Earth by a future mission [Mars Sample Return]. ...data confirm that what orbital images suggested was a river delta is indeed that and that the history of water here was complex. The boulders, which almost certainly came from the surrounding highlands, point to episodes of violent flooding at Jezero. ...On April 18 last year, Ingenuity rose to a height of 10 feet, hovered for 30 seconds, and then descended back to the ground. The flight lasted 39.1 seconds. ...NASA decided five flights were not enough. When Perseverance set off to explore the rocks to the south, Ingenuity went along, now scouting the terrain ahead of the rover. ...During the development of Perseverance’s drill, engineers tested it with a wide variety of Earth rocks. But then the very first rock on Mars that Perseverance tried to drill turned out to be unlike all of the Earth rocks. The rock in essence turned to dust during the drilling and slid out of the tube.…