NASA’s Perseverance rover has embarked on a road trip on Mars

After more than three years exploring the floor of Mars' Jezero Crater, NASA’s Perseverance rover has begun a long trek to the crater's top rim.

A road trip has begun on Mars.

NASA’s Perseverance rover, which has been roaming the red planet since 2021, has embarked on a long trek to the top of the crater in which it landed, the space agency said Tuesday.

It marks a new chapter of the rover’s mission: It’s expected to spend the next few months making a steep ascent up to the western rim of Jezero Crater, a 28-mile-wide basin north of the Martian equator that scientists think was once home to a river delta.

The trip comes after 3½ years of exploration on the floor of Jezero Crater, where Perseverance found evidence of ancient flash floods and collected several rock samples that NASA intends to bring back to Earth on a future mission.

“Perseverance has completed four science campaigns, collected 22 rock cores, and traveled over 18 unpaved miles,” Art Thompson, the mission’s project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said in a statement this month. “As we start the Crater Rim Campaign, our rover is in excellent condition, and the team is raring to see what’s on the roof of this place.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/nasa-perseverance-rover-journey-crater-rim-rcna168616

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