Perseverance captures a panoramic view of the Belva crater on Mars

May 19. (EUROPE PRESS) –

NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars has remitted a panorama with 152 images de Belva, an impact crater within Jezero crater, of whose interior it offers information.

“Mars rover missions generally end up exploring bedrock in small, flat exposures in the rover’s immediate workspace,” he said. it’s a statement Katie Stack Morgan, Associate Project Scientist for Perseverance at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“That’s why our science team was so interested in imaging and studying Belva. Impact craters can offer great views and Vertical cuts that provide important clues about the origin of these rocks with a perspective and a scale that we don’t often experience,” he added.

On Earth, geology teachers often take their students to visit highway “road cuts,” places where construction crews have vertically cut through the rock to make way for roads, which allow them to see layers of rock and other geological features that are not visible on the surface. On Mars, impact craters like Belva they can provide a kind of natural pathway.

Perseverance imaged the basin with its Matcam-Z instrument on April 22 while stationed just west of the Belva crater rim on a light-hued rock outcrop that the mission science team calls “Echo Creek.” Created by a meteorite impact eons ago, the roughly 0.9 kilometer-wide crater reveals multiple locations of exposed bedrock, as well as a region where sedimentary layers slope steeply downward.

These “dive beds” could indicate the presence of a large Martian sandbar, made of sediments, which billions of years ago was deposited by a river channel that emptied into the lake that once contained the Jezero crater.

The science team suspects that the large boulders in the foreground are chunks of bedrock exposed by the meteorite impact or may have been carried into the crater by the river system. Scientists will search for answers by continuing to compare features found in the bedrock near the rover with the larger-scale rock layers visible on the distant crater walls.