NASA's Mars rover to begin 'most challenging' journey up crater rim

Marking a new journey in NASA's exploration of Mars, the Perseverance rover is set to begin a monthslong, steep and challenging ascent up a crater, the space agency announced Wednesday.

The Perseverance rover, nicknamed "Percy," is the centerpiece of NASA's Mars 2020 mission, working to collect data in preparation for future human exploration of the Red Planet.

The car-sized spacecraft has spent two and a half years exploring the Mars Jezero Crater floor and river delta and beginning the week of Aug. 19, will start the ascent up the western rim of the crater.

"Perseverance has completed four science campaigns, collected 22 rock cores, and traveled over 18 unpaved miles," Art Thompson, Perseverance project manager at of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a press release Wednesday.

"As we start the Crater Rim Campaign, our rover is in excellent condition, and the team is raring to see what's on the roof of this place," Thompson added.

In what will be the "most challenging" journey for the rover to date, Perseverance will rely on auto-navigation capabilities while encountering slopes of up to 23 degrees on the pre-planned path up the crater.

When Perseverance summits the crater, which scientists have dubbed "Aurora Park," the rover will have gained approximately 1,000 feet in elevation.

Researchers are looking forward to the new frontier of data that awaits the rover on the crater rim, saying the mission expects "many more discoveries to come."

Eleni Ravanis, a University of Hawaiì at Mānoa scientist on Perseverance's Mastcam-Z instrument team and one of the Crater Rim Campaign science leads, said the findings will have "significant implications" in understanding the Red Planet.

"Our samples are already an incredibly scientifically compelling collection, but the crater rim promises to provide even more samples that will have significant implications for our understanding of Martian geologic history," Ravanis said in the release.