NASA’s Perseverance Rover Reads Record of Ancient Mars Impacts

https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/planets/mars/nasas-perseverance-rover-reads-record-of-ancient-mars-impacts/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nn202628 NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has uncovered evidence that a 245-foot-thick stack of ancient rock on the rim of Jezero Crater was built by repeated asteroid impacts. Referred to as the “Broom Point member” by the rover’s science team, this sequence of layered bedrock is likely more than 3.9 billion years old, making it among the oldest terrain ever examined by a Mars rover. “Since leaving Jezero, Perseverance has been exploring a brand-new frontier, both geographically and geologically — a chapter of Martian time that predates the crater itself,” said Ken Farley, Perseverance deputy project scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. “On Earth, our earliest geologic history has been fundamentally broken up, deformed, and erased by plate tectonics. Because Mars lacks plate tectonics to recycle its crust, this ancient record remains intact, giving us a rare glimpse into a geological time period that doesn’t exist on our own planet.”