NASA Reveals Clearer Mars Landscape

TEMPO.CO, Jakarta – Mars rover robot belonging to NASA, Perseverance, sent pictures of ‘foreign’ landscapes. If you don’t realize it, you might think it’s from a movie shooting location.

Since landing on Mars in February 2021, Perseverance has been exploring collecting samples, taking measurements and recording images looking for signs of a source of life. The robot is in an area called Jezero, a 28-mile-wide crater thought to have been formed by a Mars collision with another object. At that location, it is believed that an ancient river once flowed.

Among the photos Perseverance submitted is a landscape that has many large rocks that look like they are full of sculptures. Recorded on June 12, the area was likely formed by geological activity associated with rivers over millions of years. Areas with many layers of rock and sediment are called deltas and are considered candidates for finding evidence of life — if there ever was one.

This is the golden age for high-accuracy photos of Mars. In addition to Perseverance, NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter drone also documented the Jezero area from the air, while the Chinese roaming robot, Zhurong, explored the plains of Utopia Planitia to the east.

Surface of the planet Mars photographed by NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

However, all photos only show one side of the main mission Perseverance. The robotic spacecraft has previously made important scientific discoveries, such as revealing the history of rock and water at Jezero using ground-penetrating radar and measuring the speed of sound in the Martian atmosphere.

NEW SCIENTIST

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