The Perseverance Mars rover has been traveling around the Red Planet since February of 2021. For us, it's been nearly two years, but since Mars has a wider orbit, it's only been almost a year for the little guy.
Happy Martian Birthday, Perseverance
The rover hit its first Martian year this January 6th of 2023. In comparison, a year in Mars is equivalent to 687 days. Its one-year milestone also marks an important event for its mission, since it was designed to operate for a minimum of one Martian year.
Exceeding expectations, the Perseverance rover is still kicking, so it will continue its extended mission and explore the crater to find evidence of ancient and alien life. It will do so by doing what it has been doing before, which is collecting Martian rocks and regolith.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory's project manager Art Thompson mentioned that they aim to head to the top of the delta, which will begin once the "table is set" at Three Forks. The delta mentioned refers to the site of an ancient river delta, according to Digital Trends.
The rover will be having a difficult journey before it reaches the delta, but it could arrive around the next month. The mission dubbed Delta Top Campaign is said to be an opportunity to see the geological process beyond the walls of Jezero Crater, according to JPL's Katie Stack Morgan.
The mission will explore the ancient deposits brought by a river that carried debris and boulders beyond the crater. The mission will take about eight months worth of gathering samples, with the hopes of finding clues if microbial life on Mars existed.
The Perseverance is Performing Wonderfully
So far, the Mars rover has been doing its job remarkably. On January 6th, it marked another milestone by dropping its fourth backup sample at Three Forks, making the Three Forks sample cache 40% complete.
This is in case the Perseverance breaks down before the Mars lander collects the samples. In that case, helicopters from the lander will retrieve the sample and deliver it back to the vehicle. Hopefully, the rover stays intact for its extended mission.
It might take a while for the Mars rover to finish its current tasks since according to Space, Perseverance is not the easiest machine to control. It takes around an hour to retrieve a sample from the rover's own belly.
The rover has 43 titanium sample tubes in stock which are inches long each. 38 of those tubes are meant to hold samples of Martian dust, rock, and dirt that are collected. The other five are used for measuring the cleanliness of Perseverance's sampling system.
Around half of the sample tubes have already been filled, specifically 19 out of 38 tubes. That makes up for 50% of the number of tubes to be filled. 15 are held within the Mars rover and the other four are sitting at the Three Forks site.
