NASA's Perseverance rover has been on Mars since July and has been drilling and collecting rocks. Scientists are excited because they are the first of this type of rock to be gathered on another world.
Although they can be formed without the help of organisms, organics are associated with living things.
Adding to the buzz over the rock samples, Perseverance collected them from an ancient delta in Mars. If life existed in Jezero, these cores are the best chance of finding it.
If scientists ever hope to answer that question, having the core is fantastic.
NASA and the European Space Agency plan to send other spaceships to Jezero to pick up the cores that Perseverance has collected and bring them back to Earth where scientists will analyse them with advanced laboratory techniques. The samples will be the first ever to return from Mars.
Laurie Leshin, director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said at a press conference on 15 September that they needed a great suite of rocks to bring back a sample from Mars. We're off to a good start.
The Jezero Crater is 45 kilometres wide. Its main goal is to look for signs of past life, and it's prime destination is the 3.5 billion-year-old river delta.
It took more than a year forPerseverance to get to the Delta to do its main studies. It drove around Jezero's floor, where it foundigneous rocks formed directly from molten magma, or from volcanic activity. The crater floor was expected to hold rocks from the lake.
Scientists found what they had been looking for when Perseverance arrived at the Delta. Two pairs of cores from different types of rock have been collected by the rover.
One pair comes from a rock outcrop called Skinner Ridge, which is made of fine- grained sandstone similar to a type of rock seen in many places on Earth. The Skinner Ridge cores are studded with dark material and appear to be light-coloured. The dark grains were carried by the ancient river that once flowed into Jezero. Scientists might be able to tell them about the history of Mars.
There is a spot called Wildcat Ridge, which is just 20 metres away from Skinner Ridge. The samples are more similar in appearance. The mudstone seems to be even more fine-grained than the Skinner Ridge core. Evidence of past life can be found in the grains in a rock. Small grains tend to settle out in low-energy environments such as the bottom of a pond where they can preserve decaying organisms.
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Scientists spotted the organic molecule at the location. The rover ground a 5-centimetre-wide circle into the rock next to the sites where Perseverance drilled its two core. After stretching out its robotic arm, the rover looked at the mineralogy of the rock.
It was found to be richer in organics than any other spot studied. Sulfate minerals can be found in some spots that are also rich in organics. It's possible that organics and sulfate minerals were concentrated as the lake that once filled Jezero began to evaporate.
Perseverance has moved on to another area that it had explored before. There it will be able to collect more samples of fine-grained rock, as well as some of the material on the Martian surface.
Sometime before the end of the year, it will probably place six or more core samples on the ground, where they will serve as a first collection of rocks. Perseverance will continue to explore Jezero with the rest of its tubes still on board. It will roll up on top of the delta and then travel out of the crater to the ancient terrain beyond.
The miniature helicopter Ingenuity has lasted longer than the designers thought. It has only been designed for five flights. The rover has been aided by Ingenuity.
The article was first published in September of 1992.
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