NASA rover video shows stunning view in Mars crater

NASAThe Adventure Perseverance rover is currently located on a large Martian impact crater. And it has a spectacular vista.

Searching for signs of Martian desert habitability and a possible sign of extinct life, the rover snapped 152 images overlooking Belva Crater, which the space agency stitched together into a giant mosaic, and detailed in the comprehensive video below Also released as .

“Mars rover missions typically search for bedrock in small, flat exposures in the rover’s immediate field of view,” said Katie Stack Morgan, deputy project scientist for the Perseverance mission. said in a statement, “That’s why our science team was so keen to image and study Belva. Impact craters can offer gorgeous views and vertical cuts that provide important clues to the origin of these rocks and on a large scale that We don’t usually perceive.”

Mars is full of potholesPlanets, large and small, are often formed by the crashing of objects into the Red Planet. The half-mile-wide Belwa is no different. Like a highway cut into a mountainside, the crater reveals clues to Mars’ aquatic past. Downward sloping rocks may be evidence of a past Martian sandbar deposited by a major river. And the boulders in the foreground could have been thrown there with dramatic effect, or “carried into the crater by the river system,” NASA explained.

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Above the crater, the Perseverance rover has already found compelling evidence of a deep “rolling river,” which existed billions of years ago when Mars was warm, wet, and insulated by a dense atmosphere.

Planetary scientists wonder whether any primitive life could have flourished in these wet riverbeds. Millions of miles away from Earth, the search continues.