NASA’s Perseverance rover has embarked on an ambitious road trip on Mars

A road trip has begun on Mars.

NASA’s Perseverance rover, which has been roaming the red planet since 2021, has embarked on a long trek to the top of the crater in which it landed, the space agency said Tuesday.

It marks a new chapter of the rover’s mission: It’s expected to spend the next few months making a steep ascent up to the western rim of Jezero Crater, a 28-mile-wide basin north of the Martian equator that scientists think was once home to a river delta.

The trip comes after 3½ years of exploration on the floor of Jezero Crater, where Perseverance found evidence of ancient flash floods and collected several rock samples that NASA intends to bring back to Earth on a future mission.

“Perseverance has completed four science campaigns, collected 22 rock cores, and traveled over 18 unpaved miles,” Art Thompson, the mission’s project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said in a statement this month. “As we start the Crater Rim Campaign, our rover is in excellent condition, and the team is raring to see what’s on the roof of this place.”

Perseverance is likely to encounter some of the steepest and most challenging terrain it has experienced so far, according to NASA. The journey involves an elevation gain of around 1,000 feet and will most likely wrap up at the end of the year.

Throughout its travels, Perseverance will study Mars’ terrain, comparing rocks on the crater rim with those on its floor and in previously explored areas. The comparisons should give scientists a richer understanding of Mars’ landscape and its geological history.

Once the rover reaches the top, it is expected to focus on two regions: a spot nicknamed “Pico Turquino” and another dubbed “Witch Hazel Hill.”

Photos snapped from orbit suggest that Pico Turquino has some ancient fractures that may be remnants of hydrothermal systems from Mars’ distant past, according to NASA. Scientists are eager to investigate the possibility that heated water circulated beneath the Martian surface long ago; if that was the case, it could indicate that conditions were once ripe for microbial life to exist on the planet.

At Witch Hazel Hill, NASA scientists plan for Perseverance to investigate layers of bedrock that are likely to contain clues about the planet’s climate over billions of years.

Eleni Ravanis, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa and one of the science leads of the Crater Rim Campaign, said the findings will help researchers understand more about Mars’ geological evolution.

“This is because we expect to investigate rocks from the most ancient crust of Mars,” Ravanis said in a statement. “These rocks formed from a wealth of different processes, and some represent potentially habitable ancient environments that have never been examined up close before.”

Perseverance launched on July 30, 2020, and landed on Mars on Feb. 18, 2021. The mission is the first step in what is known as the Mars Sample Return campaign, a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency. The plan calls for subsequent missions to send another spacecraft to Mars to collect the samples Perseverance has gathered and bring them back to Earth.