![]() "Mars 2020, in my view, is the best opportunity we will have in our lifetime to address that question," said Kenneth Williford, the deputy project scientist for Perseverance. They'll be sealed in superclean metallic tubes on the Martian surface so that a future mission could collect them and send back to the home planet for further analysis.ĭespite decades of investigation on the question of potential life, the Red Planet has stubbornly kept its secrets. That will be critical when the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover collects its first samples for eventual return to Earth. It's great to see these scientists come to agreement in analyzing the clues, prioritizing each step, and putting together the pieces of the Jezero science puzzle." "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. Using artificial intelligence, PIXL relies on the images to determine how far away it is from a target to be scanned. ![]() PIXL, one of seven instruments aboard NASA's Perseverance Mars rover, is equipped with light diodes circling its opening to take pictures of rock targets in the dark. 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. 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. The robotic arm on NASA’s Perseverance rover reached out to examine rocks in an area on Mars nicknamed the “Cratered Floor Fractured Rough” area in this image captured on J(the 138th sol, or Martian day, of its mission). 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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