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NASA's Mars Exploration Program (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Sol 0298: Auld Lang Séítah
The panorama is made up of 99 individual Mastcam-Z images stitched together. The images were taken on Sols 286-312 (Dec. 9, 2021 to Jan. 5, 2022).
While many reflect on the past and bid it farewell, there’s a lot of exciting science to come in the next year. While many were enjoying the days between the Christmas and New Year holidays in the US, at JPL we were working to finish up sampling activities at Issole. We’ll soon bid an Auld Lang Syne to the Séítah region.
As lead Mapping Specialist, I get enjoy looking at the road ahead for the rover. We’ll start be looping back around Séítah east, following our path back towards the Octavia E. Butler Landing site, then curling counter-clockwise to the delta front. In this mission rewind, we get a chance to look at some of the intriguing outcrops we’ve seen before like at Citadelle (where we first grabbed cores 1 & 2, around the sol 180 position on August 21, 2021), perhaps a new look at the unique layering at Mure (sol 168 on August 8, 2021), or even some of the rocks we didn’t get as close to as we wanted, just east of the landing site (sol 73 on May 4th (be with you!), 2021).
Remember to follow along as we explore with our online rover map that we update every time we drive. My New Year’s resolution for the mission is to continue bringing you new maps and help scientists find the best rocks for the rover to explore throughout 2022!
Written by Fred Calef III, Mapping Specialist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory 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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Welcome to Earth! It's a planet having an iron core, with two-thirds of its surface covered by water. Earth orbits a local star called the Sun, the light of which generates the food supply for all the millions of species of life on earth. The dominant species on Earth is the human being, and you're one of the six billion of them! Humans have iron in their blood, and their bodies are composed of two-thirds water, just like the planet they live on. The physical composition of the Earth, its people and everything on it contains an electro-magnetic field which is not yet fully understood. Theories and legends about the origin of Earth, people and life itself abound, however they are not commonly discussed. The bulk of earth's people spend their time immersed in daily activities, leaving the big questions for later. "Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going? How will we get there?" Many religions and philosophies have attempted to answer these questions over the years, but so far none has given an answer that everyone on the planet can accept. In contrast to all the disagreement, the similarities among people on earth are far, far greater than any differences. Welcome again to Earth! Enjoy your stay, and try to stay calm.
