![]() We know it was there more recently than the igneous crater floor rocks formed,” said Ken Farley of Caltech, Perseverance’s project scientist and the lead author of the first of the new Science papers. “One great value of the igneous rocks we collected is that they will tell us about when the lake was present in Jezero. ![]() ![]() Igneous rocks are excellent timekeepers: Crystals within them record details about the precise moment they formed. The other two papers, published in Science Advances, detail the unique ways that Perseverance’s rock-vaporizing laser and ground-penetrating radar established that igneous rocks cover the crater floor. In Science, one offers an overview of Perseverance’s exploration of the crater floor before it arrived at Jezero’s ancient river delta in April 2022 a second study in the same journal details distinctive rocks that appear to have formed from a thick body of magma. The findings are described in four new papers published Thursday, Aug. Instead, they discovered the floor was made of two types of igneous rock – one that formed deep underground from magma, the other from volcanic activity at the surface. ![]() Scientists got a surprise when NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover began examining rocks on the floor of Jezero Crater in spring of 2021: Because the crater held a lake billions of years ago, they had expected to find sedimentary rock, which would have formed when sand and mud settled in a once-watery environment. ![]()
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