Mars Rover Fords River

The Perseverance rover has finally found a safe crossing point after being stuck in boulder fields for far too long.

The Perseverance rover has been making its way along the coastline of a long dried-up river that once allowed water to drain from Jezero Crater. Today, the Neretva Vallis river channel isn’t just dry, it’s filled with sand dunes… And sand dunes are known to be rover-eating monsters. Rather than plunging into the channel and risking a crossing where the dunes were too big, the rover has been painstakingly picking its way around boulders and hoping to find a gently slopping shoreline into a region with less dramatic dunes. This tedious process has been slow, with the rover only making it 30 meters or so at a time. Lately, mission planners have been concerned the rover would get behind schedule in its scientific explorations.

Superimposed on an image from NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter, this map shows Perseverance’s path between Jan. 21 and June 11. White dots indicate where the rover stopped after completing a traverse beside Neretva Vallis river channel. The pale blue line indicates the rover’s route inside the channel. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

That all changed in early June when Percy found safe passage down into the river bed and made its way through the dunes. In a single day, it leapt forward 200 meters to a pile of interesting rocks in the center of the channel. Since then, it has continued to wheel forward in 100-meter-ish bursts, allowing the rover to catch up to its planned schedule while taking time to check out amazing rocks that are like nothing we have seen before.