NASA's Perseverance rover has been exploring Mars for a little over two years, and it has been sending back some amazing images of the Red Planet. This time, the Mastcam-Z instrument aboard the Perseverance rover collected 152 images while looking deep into Belva Crater, a large impact crater within the far larger Jezero Crater.
NASA stitched the images together into a dramatic mosaic and also posted it in the form of a video. The images will help provide the rover's science team with some deep insights into the interior of Jezero.
''Zooming in on Belva Crater. Places like this, where nature has done the excavating for you, can be great for getting a look at exposed rocks from under the surface. Hooray for meteorites,'' the video was captioned.
Watch the video here:
Perseverance captured the images of the interior of Belva Crater on April 22, when it was parked at the west side of Belva Crater's rim on a light-toned rocky outcrop named "Echo Creek." The crater stretches approximately 0.6 miles wide (0.9 kilometers wide) and reveals multiple locations of exposed bedrock and region where sedimentary layers angle steeply downward.
The team speculates that the large boulders in the foreground may either be chunks of bedrock uncovered by the meteorite impact or transported into the crater by the river system.
"Mars rover missions usually end up exploring bedrock in small, flat exposures in the immediate workspace of the rover. That's why our science team was so keen to image and study Belva. Impact craters can offer grand views and vertical cuts that provide important clues to the origin of these rocks with a perspective and at a scale that we don't usually experience,'' Katie Stack Morgan, deputy project scientist of the Perseverance mission, said in a statement.
A few days back, NASA shared an image of Mars that potentially reveals traces of a turbulent river. The river was apparently deeper and faster-moving than previously discovered ancient waterways. The river was part of a network of waterways that flowed in Jezero Crater. Notably, it's the area the rover has been exploring since landing more than two years ago in the hopes of eventually seeking out signs of ancient microbial life.
