“The number of participants in any given action by the rover is on the order of 100. “There are almost 500 people on the science team,” Beegle said. While the rover has significant autonomous capabilities, such as driving itself across the Martian landscape, hundreds of earthbound scientists are still involved in analyzing results and planning further investigations. If we have an idea of what the history of Mars is like, we’ll be able to understand the potential for finding evidence of life.” “That does tell us a lot about the early days of Mars, and potentially how Mars formed. “What is the crater floor made out of? What were the conditions like on the crater floor?” asks Luther Beegle of JPL, SHERLOC’s principal investigator. And combined with those from PIXL, they can provide a broader environmental and even historical snapshot of Jezero Crater. Such details can provide important clues about formation history, water flow, and ancient, potentially habitable Martian environments. SHERLOC – short for Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals – uses an ultraviolet laser to identify some of the minerals in the rock, while WATSON takes closeup images that scientists can use to determine grain size, roundness, and texture, all of which can help determine how the rock was formed.Įarly WATSON closeups have already yielded a trove of data from Martian rocks, the scientists said, such as a variety of colors, sizes of grains in the sediment, and even the presence of “cement” between the grains. To get a detailed profile of rock textures, contours, and composition, PIXL’s maps of the chemicals throughout a rock can be combined with mineral maps produced by the SHERLOC instrument and its partner, WATSON.
“If life was there in Jezero Crater, the evidence of that life could be there,” said Allwood, a key member of the Perseverance “arm science” team. The crater has long since dried out, and the rover is now picking its way across its red, broken floor. Scientists say Jezero Crater was a crater lake billions of years ago, making it a choice landing site for Perseverance. That’s just a small taste of what PIXL, combined with the arm’s other instruments, is expected to reveal as it zeroes in on promising geological features over the weeks and months ahead. “We got our best-ever composition analysis of Martian dust before it even looked at rock,” Allwood said.
Located at the end of the arm, the lunchbox-size instrument fired its X-rays at a small calibration target – used to test instrument settings – aboard Perseverance and was able to determine the composition of Martian dust clinging to the target. Called PIXL, or Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry, the rover’s X-ray instrument delivered unexpectedly strong science results while it was still being tested, said Abigail Allwood, PIXL’s principal investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
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