What Is The Mars River Delta And Why Is Perseverance Going There?

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NASA's Perseverance drove a long way back to where it first landed on Mars just to get to a new site, the river delta. Perseverance recently celebrated its first year on the Red Planet and NASA shared the rover's achievements with the world. The small Ingenuity Mars helicopter has been shadowing the rover.

Perseverance is a magnificent feat of engineering built for one purpose, to find signs of ancient life and collect samples from Mars. The rover has three built-in advanced robots that drill, sample, tube, process, and store rocks and regolith. NASA is pushing forward with an epic mission that will travel to Mars to recollect the Perseverance samples and fly them back to Earth.

Related: NASA Needs Your Help To Detect Life On Mars

Perseverance has a fixed destination and NASA is determined to help it get there soon. It is coming up upon the river delta. “If microbial life did exist here in the past, this is one of the best places to look for it,” the NASA JPL team said. The rover is now in high gear riding around the northern tip of Séítah to go west and reach the location. Deltas provide a unique opportunity and are known for their potential to store fossilized forms of life.

The Martian delta where Perseverance is going has been dry for billions of years. However, it is still the perfect location for the rover's main mission. Deltas can store running water that is in contact with the high surface of the soil. Delta waters drag sediments, usually soft, which builds layers on top of layers. Life forms are trapped on one layer and sealed off naturally by the next. As a result, this structure can be read like an open book by scientists and astrobiologists.

Perseverance will take a close look and sample sedimentary rock