The Perseverance rover has been racking up the odometry en route to the site of it’s next science campaign. It’s been a trip down memory lane since leaving Séítah on Sol 340 (Feb 2, 2022) and retracing our tracks back to the Octavia E. Butler landing site. Our goal is to sample a Ch’ał member rock, a higher standing boulder that possibly represents a unique geologic chapter in the crater floor history.
If microbial life did exist here in the past, this is one of the best places to look for it as layered muds may have buried and preserved a record of that activity. Since landing, we have been collecting long distance observations with the Mastcam-Z and SuperCam instruments to learn more about the structure and mineralogy of the delta.
