Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU
It’s not every day that the American space agency NASA says something shocking. The organization is a respectable organization by profession and generally avoids sensational titles. But not this week, when it was announced plain and simple that “Perseverance finds popcorn on planet Mars.”
Perseverance, formerly known as Mars 2020, is NASA’s latest rover to be sent to the Red Planet. It left our world in the summer of 2020 and arrived at a place called Jezero Crater in the spring of the following year.
The rover’s main mission is to look for signs of ancient microbial life in an attempt to prove that the neighboring planet was once hospitable enough to support life as we know it. To do this, it uses a range of instruments, including cameras, spectrometers, environmental sensors and radars.
The rover, so packed with hardware, also served as the initial launch pad for the world’s first helicopter to be used in the atmosphere of another planet.
Small in size and looking a lot like some kind of insect (or drone, if you prefer a more technical comparison), Ingenuity flew into the Martian sky 72 times, covering a total of 17 km and reaching heights of 24 meters ( 78.7 feet) and stay airborne for a total of 128.8 minutes.
The helicopter didn’t make any major discoveries, but it did open the doors to a whole new way to explore extraterrestrial places, one that NASA plans to use widely on future missions. For that reason, the agency calls the helicopter’s performance a ‘Wright Brothers moment.”
Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech
While on location on Mars, Perseverance was given yet another mission: It was tasked with collecting samples from the Martian soil and depositing them at precise locations on the surface for an upcoming mission called Mars Sample Return.
Quite a busy and capable bee, this Perseverance, but did it really find popcorn on Mars?
First, here’s a little bit about where the rover is now. After landing in Jezero Crater, the wheeled machine moved around quite a bit, traveling nearly 17 miles from the landing site. Currently it’s doing its thing in a region of the planet called Neretva Vallis, a formation believed to be an ancient river channel that fed water into the crater.
There is access to it in this Vallis “various boulders and pieces of lighter rock” people call Mount Washburn. As interesting as this place is, it also gave the Perseverance a look at another landmark, a place so light in color that it’s called the Bright Angel.
The rover arrived near this location this week and it is here where the popcorn was found. Well, not really popcorn, but rocks densely packed with small balls of popcorn-like texture.
The space agency has released an image of the site so we can get a better idea of what it’s about (main photo of this piece), but to be honest I’m having a pretty hard time locating the popcorn-like, bulbous rocks where we are. is told about. But then again, I’m not a geologist.
Photo: NASA
By all accounts, these things, even if they aren’t the movie snacks we all love, are described as unlike anything the rover has ever encountered before, strange textures that “mesmerizedgeologists.
Apart from these rock balls, the place is filled with sharp-edged rocks, in a much greater quantity than previously found.
The initial assessment is that these features are yet another indication that groundwater flowed through this region at some point billions of years ago, but after the rocks were deposited.
Due to the strangeness of the place, NASA plans to keep Perseverance in the region for a while to conduct more detailed research. An upslope trip is planned as scientists will search for the origin of this rock series and how it relates to the rest of the Vallis.
When the time is right, likely as early as next weekend (June 22), one of the rover’s instruments, a sanding instrument installed on the rover’s arm, will be used to take a closer look at the rocks and perform a chemical analysis to feed. Depending on what this analysis reveals, a decision will be made as to whether or not to sample the site.
After its mission in the Neretva Vallis is over, the Perseverance heads to a location called Serpentine Rapids. It will probably find something interesting there too, but we just hope NASA doesn’t call these findings another food name, or something that gives us false reasons to hope we’ve found aliens.
Or if it calls them that, maybe it will at least use some sort of punctuation that tells us it’s a joke.