Somewhere on the Martian surface, NASA’s Perseverance rover is now diligently conducting its missions. Among these missions is that of bring small rocky samples from the red planet to Earth, so that scientists can study its composition and, perhaps, find signs of life. But what does this have to do with carving a letter L on the face of Mars? Well, it makes more sense than you think.
Perseverance is located specifically in the Jezero Crater, near the Isidis Planitia region. This area, generated after the impact of a meteorite, once housed a lake inside. This lake bed could contain definitive evidence of life on Marsor at least those that indicate there once was one.
Therefore, Perseverance is currently collecting samples of this soil. However, it is not worth collecting for collecting, and it is that NASA needs to know the specific points from which each of them came out, and its orientation on the planet. How can they know in such an unknown region? One “easy” way is by pointing it out on the host rocky base, and that’s why the rover is carving small-scale “graffiti” on the planet.
How has NASA’s Perseverance carved giant graffiti on Mars?
As described in CNET, the rover has achieved this thanks to the use of a laser in its SuperCam instrument. With this, has managed to open three holes that offer the same shape as the letter L.
During a report this Thursday, Roger Wiens, the principal investigator of SuperCam, comments that it is “the first letter to be laser engraved on Mars“.
In addition to searching for life on the planet, the rover is also involved in another mission. Martian sample collection would allow researchers to piece together the history of Mars’ magnetic field, and how it impacted the atmosphere of the red planet. Therefore, scientists need to easily recognize the orientation of the rock pieces, which would allow them to understand the original directions of the magnetic domains of the samples.
The best way to detect the orientation of rock samples is marking them with recognizable shapes for the human being.
Now that they have seen that this new procedure has been successful, they plan to take it to sample collections as well future. So don’t expect the recorded messages on Mars to end here, they’re just beginning… Just don’t expect a “Percy was here” message. NASA has made it quite clear that they prefer to focus their efforts on research and not nonsense.