Perseverance Rover Retrieves Key Clues to Mars’ Geologic and Water History

August 25, 2022

New findings from Jezero Crater in Mars involving Prof. David Shuster are currently featured in Berkeley New: https://news.berkeley.edu/2022/08/25/perseverance-rover-retrieves-key-cl...

As the piece describes: "The main surprise, Shuster said, is that the rocks collected from four sites on the floor of Jezero Crater are igneous cumulate rocks — that is, they were formed by the cooling of molten magma and are the best rocks for precise geochronology once the samples have returned to Earth. They also show evidence of having been altered by water.

“From a sampling perspective, this is huge,” he said. “The fact that we have evidence of aqueous alteration of igneous rocks — those are the ingredients that people are very excited about, with regard to understanding environmental conditions that could potentially have supported life at some point after these rocks were formed.”"

Berkeley News