NASA's Perseverance rover has been busy exploring Mars' "Wild West."
What is it?
Perseverance has been exploring the Martian surface for more than five years. Starting this year, the rover began its journey through "Lac de Charmes," an area that the mission team considers the "Wild West frontier" for the rover, according to a recent update.
This region, which is west of the rim of Jezero Crater where the mission landed, is home to valleys and ridges, as well as some of the oldest rocks the rover has encountered yet.
To get to the "Wild West frontier," the mission team had Perseverance snake through different interesting areas. On the journey to "Lac de Charmes," the rover collected data that the team can use to better piece together the story of how the region formed and how it has evolved over the years.
Why is it incredible?
In this latest update, the mission team shared that, not only is Perseverance continuing to explore this region, but it's doing so with the help of a repurposed processor originally intended to allow the mission to talk to the Ingenuity helicopter.
With observations Perseverance has made so far, the mission has found that the igneous rocks in this area may have formed from cooling lava or magma, or even as the result of a violent impact, according to the update.
The rocks in this region are so old that they "formed when Mars was still a young planet bombarded by asteroid impacts, long before the sedimentary rocks inside Jezero Crater formed in rivers and lakes," Athanasios (Thanos) Klidaras, a Ph.D. candidate at Purdue University, said in the mission update.
"They therefore could teach us much about the earliest era of Martian history — and, more broadly, how rocky planets evolved during the tumultuous early history of our solar system," Klidaras added.
