- Investigating the site of an ancient river delta, the Perseverance rover has collected some of the most important samples yet on its mission to determine if life ever existed on Mars, according to NASA scientists.
- A few of the recently collected samples include organic matter, indicating that Jezero Crater, which likely once held a lake and the delta that emptied into it, had potentially habitable environments 3.5 billion years ago.
- “The rocks that we have been investigating on the delta have the highest concentration of organic matter that we have yet found on the mission,” said Ken Farley, Perseverance project scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.