Perseverance Rover’s Photos Help Scientists Build Picture of Mars’ Past

In its 217 days — or 211 Martian sols — on the Red Planet, Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Perseverance rover has snapped more than 144,000 photos with its suite of sophisticated cameras, providing researchers and other Earthlings with an unprecedented glimpse of the planet, as well as insight into its ancient history.

Perseverance carries seven science cameras and nine engineering cameras, according to a statement issued by JPL. Images have steadily poured in from the rover ever since it landed at Jezero Crater in February.

The photos provide researchers with much more than interesting scenery, said Vivian Sun, who co-leads Perseverance’s first science campaign at JPL.

“The imaging cameras are a huge piece of everything. We use a lot of them every single day for science. They’re absolutely mission-critical,” she said.

Scientists learn more about the planet with each new photo.

“The dusty rocks there are beginning to tell their story… about a volatile young Mars flowing with lava and water,” according to the statement.

Perseverance’s cameras come in a variety of shapes and sizes, each with different capabilities.

It uses two “navigation cameras” to help it plan its course of travel across Mars’ surface, as well as to identify features of interest to examine more closely with other cameras and instruments, Sun explained.

“The navigation camera data is really useful to have those images to do a targeted science follow-up with higher-resolution instruments such as SuperCam and Mastcam-Z,” she said.

The Rover’s Mastcam-Z contains a pair of lenses enabling it to take panoramic color images, including 3D pictures, zoom and high definition video, according to JPL.

“The instrument also functions as a low-resolution spectrometer, dividing the light it captures into 11 colors,” the statement said. “Scientists can analyze the colors for clues about the composition of the material giving off the light, helping them decide which features to zoom in on with the mission’s true spectrometers.”

For close-up shots, Perseverance’s “SuperCam” is brought into action, the statement added. “It includes the Remote Micro-Imager, or RMI, which can zoom in on features the size of a softball from more than a mile away.

It’s helped discover Martian features such as water-weathered boulders, providing strong evidence of past flash flooding in Jezero Crater, officials said.

“In addition, scientists have picked up signs of igneous rock that formed from lava or magma on the crater floor during this early period. That could mean not only flowing water, but flowing lava, before, during, or after the time that the lake itself formed,” the statement said. “These clues are crucial to the mission’s search for signs of ancient Martian life and potentially habitable environments.”

When scientists want to get extremely up close to a subject for inspection, they employ the Rover’s Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and Engineering, or WATSON, along with its partner in the Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals instrument, or  SHERLOC.

Together, the sensitive scientific tools can image tiny grains of Martian dust, and even analyze the chemical composition of targets, said SHERLOC Principal Investigator Luther Beegle of JPL.

“We’re getting really cool spectra of materials formed in aqueous [watery] environments – for example, sulfate and carbonate,” he said.

Beegle added that he was excited about the discoveries yet to come.

“Once we get over closer to the delta, where there should be really good preservation potential for signs of life, we’ve got a really good chance of seeing something if it’s there,” he said.

A complete gallery of raw images taken by Perseverance can be found online at mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images.

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Perseverance Rover Coverage