By 
July 5th, 2025
On the prowl at Jezero Crater, NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover is loaded with scientific equipment.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover within Jezero Crater has provided compelling evidence regarding the long-term evolution of the early martian atmosphere and hydrosphere.
The process of “serpentinization” — or the aqueous alteration of olivine-bearing rocks – is believed to have shaped both habitability and the long-term planetary evolution of early Mars.
Serpentinization also may have helped shape the habitability of aqueous environments on early Mars more generally and within Jezero crater specifically.
Geological context for the Máaz formation abrasion patches. (A) Modified photogeologic map of western Jezero crater. (B) Rover traverse during the first roughly 370 sols and location of four abraded targets of the Máaz formation, overlayed on a NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) mosaic.
Image credit: OEB, Octavia E. Butler
Samples collected
New research led by Nicholas Tosca, a professor of Mineralogy and Petrology at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, points to the samples collected to date by the NASA robot “as potential archives of such astrobiologically significant processes.”
Samples extracted from the Jezero crater floor and cached by the Perseverance rover “are therefore among the highest priority targets for potential Mars sample return,” reports Tosca and research colleagues.
Ancient Jezero Crater is depicted in this artistic view, replete with shoreline of a lake that dried up billions of years ago.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/JHU-APL
Máaz formation
New geochemical and mineralogical data from multiple instruments aboard the Perseverance rover record serpentinization and associated hydrogen production in ancient igneous rocks of the Máaz formation, exposed on the Jezero crater floor, Tosca and team members report.
The first samples collected by robot were from the Máaz formation, a lava plain that covers most of the floor of Jezero crater.
Go to this just-published paper in Science Advances – “In situ evidence for serpentinization within the Máaz formation, Jezero crater, Mars” – at:
Posted in Space News
