Summary
NASA’s Perseverance rover will soon begin its primary scientific task: drilling out finger-size cores of martian rock for return to Earth. If all goes well, the first drilling sample will be collected from Jezero crater, a former lakebed, by early August. One kilometer south of its landing site, Perseverance has reached an array of what its operating team calls paver stones—flat, white, dust-coated rocks found throughout the crater floor. Here, on what is believed to be the most ancient terrain in the crater, the team will direct the rover to drill and collect its sample. After that first sampling, the rover will then turn to Séítah, a region of sand dunes and ridges to its west that the car-size rover has skirted past. Séítah has unexpectedly complex geology, including layered terrain that might preserve signs of past life or patterns of water flow. Those exposures could test the idea that Jezero hosted a long-lived lake, with periods of later flooding, as suggested by boulders on the delta front.
