Over the course of nearly five months in 2022, NASA’s Perseverance rover collected rock samples from Mars that could rewrite the history of water on the Red Planet and even contain evidence for past life on Mars.
But the information they contain can’t be extracted without more detailed analysis on Earth, which requires a new mission to the planet to retrieve the samples and bring them back. Scientists hope to have the samples on Earth by 2033, though NASA’s sample return mission may be delayed.
“These samples are the reason why our mission was flown,” said paper co-author David Shuster, professor of earth and planetary science at the University of California, Berkeley, and a member of NASA’s science team for sample collection. “This is exactly what everyone was hoping to accomplish. And we’ve accomplished it. These are what we went looking for.”
The critical importance of these rocks, sampled from river deposits in a dried-up lake that once filled a crater called Jezero, is detailed in a study published Aug. 14 in AGU Advances, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
“These are the first and only sedimentary rocks that have been studied and collected from a planet other than Earth,” said Shuster. “Sedimentary rocks are important because they were transported by water, deposited into a standing body of water and subsequently modified by chemistry that involved liquid water on the surface of Mars at some point in the past. The whole reason that we came to Jezero was to study this sort of rock type. These are absolutely fantastic samples for the overarching objectives of the mission.”
Shuster is co-author of the paper with first author Tanja Bosak, a geobiologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge.