NASA’s Perseverance rover has finished an epic climb on Mars.
The Perseverance rover crested the rim of the Red Planet’s Jezero Crater this week, wrapping up a 3.5-month-long trek during which it gained about 1,640 vertical feet (500 meters) and tackled 20% slopes with slippery, shifting footing.
“During the Jezero Crater rim climb, our rover drivers have done an amazing job negotiating some of the toughest terrain we’ve encountered since landing,” Steven Lee, deputy project manager for Perseverance at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, said in a statement on Thursday (Dec. 12).
“They developed innovative approaches to overcome these challenges — even tried driving backward to see if it would help — and the rover has come through it all like a champ,” Lee added. “Perseverance is ‘go’ for everything the science team wants to throw at it during this next science campaign.”
Related: NASA’s Perseverance rover begins ambitious ascent up a Mars crater rim
Perseverance landed on the floor of the 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) Jezero in February, on a mission to hunt for signs of past life on Mars and gather samples for future return to Earth.
The six-wheeled Mars rover has done this work over the course of four different science campaigns. As Lee noted, Perseverance made the rim climb to set up a new campaign — one the team is calling “Northern Rim.”
“The Northern Rim campaign brings us completely new scientific riches as Perseverance roves into fundamentally new geology,” Ken Farley, project scientist for Perseverance at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said in the same statement.
“It marks our transition from rocks that partially filled Jezero Crater when it was formed by a massive impact about 3.9 billion years ago to rocks from deep down inside Mars that were thrown upward to form the crater rim after impact,” he added. “These rocks represent pieces of early Martian crust and are among the oldest rocks found anywhere in the solar system. Investigating them could help us understand what Mars — and our own planet — may have looked like in the beginning.”
The new science campaign will be a lengthy and involved one; in the next year, Perseverance is expected to visit up to four different geological sites and cover about 4 miles (6.4 km) of Red Planet ground, mission team members said.
Perseverance reached the top of Jezero’s rim at a spot the mission team calls Lookout Hill. The rover has already left that site and is rolling toward Witch Hazel Hill, an interesting outcrop about 1,500 feet (450 m) away.
“The campaign starts off with a bang, because Witch Hazel Hill represents over 330 feet [100 m] of layered outcrop, where each layer is like a page in the book of Martian history,” Candice Bedford, a Perseverance scientist from Purdue University in Indiana, said in the same statement. “As we drive down the hill, we will be going back in time, investigating the ancient environments of Mars recorded in the crater rim.”
After that, the rover will head toward Lac de Charmes, which lies about 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) south.
“Lac de Charmes intrigues the science team because, being located on the plains beyond the rim, it is less likely to have been significantly affected by the formation of Jezero Crater,” NASA officials wrote in the same statement.
