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NASA's Mars Exploration Program (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Sol 1155: Former river banks on the Neretva Vallis Delta
The panorama is made up of 246 individual Mastcam-Z images stitched together. The images were taken on Sol 1155 (May 20, 2024).
Looking at some extremely ancient (over 3.5 billion years old) and weathered rocks on the marginal unit on the former river banks on the Neretva Vallis Delta. Some looking into the Neretva Vallis channel.
Driven along the edge of the marginal unit alongside the now long very long gone Neretva Vallis River.
Many of these rocks on the Upper Fan of the Neretva Vallis Delta are likely from other regions particularly the Syrtis Major formation out side of Jezero Crater, bought there by the long dried out Neretva Vallis river. These therefore will be of added interest.
The Neretva Vallis Delta from Perseverance and these observations are already contributing to how a martian delta formed and compare with deltas on Earth such as the Nile Delta in Egypt, Amazon Delta in Brazil, Mississippi Delta in the USA, etc, and how through weathering, extremely ancient sediments are being revealed. Formed from when Mars was warmer, wetter and more Earth like than now with a far denser atmosphere.
All ten initial sample tubes have been successfully deployed awaiting collection for return to Earth in or around 2031.
Text: Andrew R Brown
Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.
The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed for the agency by Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.
Other panoramas of Mars by Perseverance rover:
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The planet Earth has proven to be too limiting for our awesome community of panorama photographers. We're getting an increasing number of submissions that depict locations either not on Earth (like Mars, the Moon, and Outer Space in general) or do not realistically represent a geographic location on Earth (either because they have too many special effects or are computer generated) and hence don't strictly qualify for our Panoramic World project.But many of these panoramas are extremely beautiful or popular of both.So, in order to accommodate our esteemed photographers and the huge audience that they attract to 360Cities with their panoramas, we've created a new section (we call it an "area") called "Out of this World" for panoramas like these.Don't let the fact that these panoramas are being placed at the Earth's South Pole fool you - we had to put them somewhere in order not to interfere with our Panoramic World.Welcome aboard on a journey "Out of this World".
