Purdue professor, Perseverance member preparing for year two as rover mission reaches landing anniversary

Friday (Feb. 18) will mark one year since the rover landed on the red planet following a seven-month, 300-million-mile flight through space for the NASA project.

The mission team opted to land the rover in Jezero Crater because of a dry lake and river delta located there. The team expects to reach the delta by spring and begin the key objective of searching for signs of ancient microbial life by examining the planet’s geology.

“We’ll spend most of the next year on the delta, exploring this ancient lake and river environment and looking for signs of ancient life-like organic material and signs of microbes,” said Horgan, associate professor of planetary science in Purdue’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences in the College of Science.

Watch video of Horgan as she talks about the first year of the mission.

Horgan is long-term planner as part of the science leadership team for Perseverance, helping guide the mission strategy and scientific investigations. She discusses the rover mission on an episode of the “This is Purdue” podcast.

The mission will have collected four unique rock samples from Mars. More samples are expected as the rover heads onto the delta.

“By analyzing these samples back on Earth, we can actually figure out when the delta was there and when there was water in the crater,” Horgan said. “That’s a really big question because we only have estimates for when we think Mars was wet and was habitable. We really don’t know for sure.”

Horgan has been involved with several aspects of this mission. She led mineralogy research using satellite data before landing, and her team produced one of the major results on the location that contributed to NASA’s selection of Jezero Crater.

The mission is intended to last three years. Horgan said that after the three-year point, the hope is Perseverance will continue outside Jezero Crater for as long as possible.

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