NASA’s Perseverance rover has had a busy first month on Mars’s surface. From Jezero Crater, where Perseverance landed on 18 February, it has been doing as much geology as it can — snapping pictures of its surroundings and analysing the rocks nearby. Already, team scientists have determined that several of the rocks are chemically similar to volcanic rocks on Earth, and that wind and water have eroded some of them.
“Everything is going great so far,” said Kenneth Farley, a geochemist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and the mission’s project scientist. He and others described Perseverance’s progress on 16 March at a virtual meeting of the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.
