I have chosen to discuss the Perseverance rover, designed to explore crater Jezero in the Mars 2020 mission. According to Farley et al. (2020), the mission of the Perseverance rover lies “in the deep search for evidence of life in a habitable extraterrestrial environment, and the return of Martian samples to Earth for analysis in terrestrial laboratories” (p. 141) In another word, the Perseverance rover aimed at astrobiology issues, manly collecting martian samples, and the finding proves for ie on Mars. Jezero crater was chosen for landing because several billion years ago it was “a 40 km diameter, few hundred-meter-deep lakes, with both an inflow and an outflow channel (Farley et al 2020, p. 142). Thus, scientists tried to find some evidence to discover evidence of some microbes and bacteria if they formerly lived on Mars to find evidence of life there.
It became known that the Perseverance rover launched on the surface of Mars daring the COVID-19 pandemic. After the month spent on Mars, it became evident that some of the rocks are similar to volcanic rocks on Earth by their chemical composition (Witze, 2021). Scientists realized this because of Perseverance’s geological work: it was snapping pictures with the help of cameras and analyzing the rocks nearby. Interestingly the rover has a laser-based instrument to analyze the findings. For instance, the “instrument zaps rocks with a laser to vaporize small portions and study their chemical make-up,” which helps scientists of Eat receive the analysis results and produce conclusions or, at last, suggest some hypothesis (Witze, 2021).
Therefore, scientists may become sure that the Jezero crater might have volcanic rocks that interacted with water for some time.