On Mars, a Year of Surprise and Discovery
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/15/science/mars-nasa-perseverance.html By Kenneth Chang , The New York Times. 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 ro...