Leonard David's INSIDE OUTER SPACE

Jezero Crater – home base for Perseverance rover.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/JHU-APL

NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover has snapped over 200,000 images since it landed on Mars within the Jezero Crater in February 2021 – and there have been surprises.

Arizona State University’s Jim Bell is NASA’s principal investigator for Mastcam-Z – two cameras that are inside the box that looks like a rectangular crow’s nest atop the rover’s pivoting mast.

ASU’s Jim Bell.
Credit: ASU/Stephen Filmer/Inside Outer Space screengrab

Perseverance is busily gathering specimens for the anticipated fetch and fly of pre-plucked collectibles by the Mars Sample Return project NASA/European Space Agency undertaking in the 2030s.

Contingency sample site

To assist in that effort, the robot’s Mastcam-Z’s next role will be helping locate and create a contingency sample site.

Mastcam-Z is mounted on the rover mast at the eye level of a 6 ½-foot-tall person (2 meters tall). The cameras are separated by 9.5 inches (24.2 centimeters) to provide stereo vision.
Credit: NASA

“Sometime in the next month or so, we will take roughly half of the samples that we’ve collected so far and place them in a pretty boring flat area right in front of the [large] delta” – a geological feature of the Jezero Crater, Bell says in an ASU statement.

This site is a “just-in-case” backup plan by NASA, in the event the rover doesn’t operate as long as predicted.

Go to this ASU-provided video by Stephen Filmer that details what’s been observed to date by the Perseverance rover at Jezero Crater…with unexpected results at:

Go to: https://vimeo.com/776783614