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NASA's Mars Exploration Program (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Sol 1399: What ‘Perseverance’ Means on Mars and for Our NASA Family
The panorama is made up of 102 individual Mastcam-Z images stitched together. The images were taken on Sols 1399 (Jan. 26, 2025).
Perseverance is defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as the “continued effort to do or achieve something despite difficulties, failure, or opposition.” The Mars 2020 rover team has truly embodied the rover’s namesake — from working together to launch the Perseverance rover during a global pandemic, to navigating the impact of the recent California wildfires. Over the last month, members of the rover’s family at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech have faced many challenges due to these wildfires.
Things have been a little slow on Mars as Perseverance patiently waits for its earthly friends to recover during such challenging times. (Note: Nominal operations resumed this week.) This quiet period has allowed the rover to reflect on the many accomplishments of the Mars 2020 mission over several years since landing in Jezero crater. These accomplishments range from discovering volcanic rocks and sampling ancient lake beds to investigating rocks with possible biosignatures.
Despite the challenges back on Earth, Perseverance still has much to look forward to this year. Looking ahead, the rover’s exploration of the crater rim continues to be an exciting endeavor as Perseverance ventures into uncharted Martian territories. Exploration of the crater rim will involve the analysis of more intriguing rocks to understand the geological history of Mars and its potential for past life. The rover is approaching Witch Hazel Hill, an exciting area of interest for its potential to host some of the oldest exposed Mars bedrock, and will use a variety of instrument techniques to explore the many layers of rock exposed here. This may be the rover’s chance to explore ancient rocks that were uplifted and exposed during the impact that created Jezero crater. These rocks may reveal key information about Mars’ ancient climate history and the formation of Mars’ early crust.
During Perseverance’s investigation of the crater rim, the rover will add to its out-of-this-world rock collection. Each rock can tell a story about its past, leveraging insights into whether there was a body of water, a nearby volcano, or the possibility of microbial life. On the crater rim, Perseverance is searching for rocks that are more than 4 billion years old — unique to Mars since most materials that old on Earth have been altered or destroyed by the planet’s recycling system (plate tectonics). The rover is also interested in collecting samples from hydrothermal systems or impact melt. Don’t ask the rover what its favorite rock is because it won’t tell you — Perseverance says it loves them all!
Perseverance is ready to “rover-come” any challenges this year and looks forward to embarking on its continued journey onto the crater rim. The rover would not be able to accomplish these incredible feats without the guidance and support of its internationally distributed operations team. While our team members regroup, heal, and work together to rebuild here on Earth, Perseverance waits patiently, ready to continue its journey on the Red Planet.
Written by Margaret Deahn, Ph.D. student, and Stephanie Connell, Ph.D. candidate, at Purdue University A key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust). Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis. The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed for the agency by Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover. Other panoramas of Mars by Perseverance rover:
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The planet Earth has proven to be too limiting for our awesome community of panorama photographers. We're getting an increasing number of submissions that depict locations either not on Earth (like Mars, the Moon, and Outer Space in general) or do not realistically represent a geographic location on Earth (either because they have too many special effects or are computer generated) and hence don't strictly qualify for our Panoramic World project.But many of these panoramas are extremely beautiful or popular of both.So, in order to accommodate our esteemed photographers and the huge audience that they attract to 360Cities with their panoramas, we've created a new section (we call it an "area") called "Out of this World" for panoramas like these.Don't let the fact that these panoramas are being placed at the Earth's South Pole fool you - we had to put them somewhere in order not to interfere with our Panoramic World.Welcome aboard on a journey "Out of this World".
