Written by By Henry Manelski, Ph.D. student at Purdue University
Last week, the Perseverance rover began an exciting new journey. Driving northwest of the Soroya ridge, Perseverance entered an area filled with a diverse range of boulders that the science team believes could hold clues to Mars’ early history. The terrain we are exploring is known as megabreccia: a chaotic mixture of broken rock fragments likely produced during ancient asteroid impacts. Some blocks may have originated in the gargantuan Isidis impact event, which created a 1,200-mile-wide crater (about 1,930 kilometers) just east of Jezero. Studying megabreccia could help us link Jezero’s geology to the wider region around Isidis Basin, tying local observations to Mars’ global history.
The rover is now beginning a systematic exploration of these rocks, starting at Scotiafjellet. If they are truly megabreccia, they could contain pieces of deep crustal material, offering a rare glimpse into Mars’ interior. These rocks likely predate the deltaic and volcanic deposits we explored earlier in Jezero Crater, making them some of the oldest accessible rocks Perseverance will ever encounter. They may therefore reveal to what extent water was present on ancient Mars — a key question as we continue our search for signs of past life on the Red Planet. In short, by venturing into this jumbled terrain, Perseverance is giving us a front-row seat to the earliest chapters of Mars’ story.
