Since the Perseverance rover landed in Jezero crater on Mars in February, the rover and its team of scientists back on Earth have been hard at work exploring the floor of the crater that once held an ancient lake. Perseverance and the Mars 2020 mission are looking for signs of ancient life on Mars and preparing a returnable cache of samples for later analyses on Earth.
Katie Stack Morgan is the Mars 2020 Deputy Project Scientist and a research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and will be providing an update on early results on the Mars 2020 rover mission on Sunday, 10 Oct., at the Geological Society of America's Connects 2021 annual meeting in Portland, Oregon.
With Perseverance's high-tech suite of on-board instruments, the scientific team has been analyzing the rocks of the crater floor, interpreted for now as igneous rocks, presumably a volcanic lava flow.
"The idea that this could be a volcanic rock was really appealing to us from a sample return perspective because igneous rocks are great for getting accurate age dates. Jezero was one of the few ancient crater lake sites on Mars that seemed to have both incredible sedimentary deposits as well as volcanic deposits that could help us construct the geologic time scale of Mars," said Stack Morgan.
The lake system and rivers that drained into Jezero crater were likely active around 3.8-3.6 billion years ago, but the ability to directly date the age of the rocks in laboratories on Earth will provide the first definitive insight into the window of time that Mars may have been a habitable planet.
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