Purdue professor, Mars rover mission team member looks at what is ahead

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – In less than a month, the Perseverance mission team will mark a full year since the Mars rover began exploring our neighboring planet.

Purdue's Briony Horgan, Perseverance mission member, looks forward to the team's next focus – studying the planet's large river delta, now dry.

“When we chose the landing site, it was because of the delta; that’s the reason we’re here,” said Horgan, associate professor of planetary science in the Purdue College of Science’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, in a release. “So, we’ll be excited to finally get up close and study it.”

Horgan's duties included leading mineralogy research using satellite data before landing, the release stated, producing results that contributed to NASA’s selection of Jezero Crater as the rover's landing site.

The crater, Purdue's release stated, once held a lake and the river delta.

 “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,” she said in the announcement.

During the mission's three-year journey, the Mars rover will collect rock and dust samples. After the those three year, Horgan stated, Perseverance will hopefully continue outside Jezero Crater indefinitely.

The key objective of the rover mission is to search for signs of microbial life, according to Purdue, by examining Mars' geology. A single rover journey could last 12-15 hours of travel, taking as long to prepare.

The second year of the mission, Horgan said in the release, the team hopes to move away from semi-autonomous travel. 

“With all the new technology on the rover, we’re working on how to drive on consecutive days and do longer and longer autonomous drives,” she said. “Then we’ll make a beeline for the delta as fast as we can.”

While a layered ridge spotted after landing turned out not to be semimentary rock that could reveal biosignatures of Mars' history, the material was determined to be ancient lava flow that could still provide answers.

 “By doing that, we can actually figure out when the delta was there and when there was water in the crater,” Horgan said in the release. “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.”

Four unique rock and dust samples are expected to be collected by next month’s landing anniversary, Horgan stated.

“It’s an incredibly ambitious mission, with goals that are leaps and bounds beyond any previous Mars rover and really any previous space mission had been supposed to do: how far and fast we’re supposed to drive, how many samples we’re supposed to drill …,” Horgan said in the release. “We’re still learning a lot.”

Deanna Watson is the executive editor at the Journal & Courier. Contact her at dwatson@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter at @deannawatson66.