Friday

After a successful landing on Feb. 18, 2021, the NASA Mars 2020 mission's Perseverance rover science team has been conducting instrument checkout/calibration activities, support activities for the Ingenuity helicopter demonstration mission, and initial scientific reconnaissance of the floor of Jezero crater. That initial reconnaissance has revealed numerous puzzles about the nature and origin/evolution of the crater floor materials, some of which will eventually be sampled and cached for future return to Earth. Once the instrument and sampling system checkouts and initial reconnaissance activities have completed, the current plan is to guide the rover to the crater's western delta deposits (about 2 km from the landing site), which are also revealing puzzles and from which more samples are expected to be acquired from an environment that is hypothesized to have once been habitable for life. This presentation will review some of the early activities and key observations so far from the mission.