![]() These “dipping beds” could indicate the presence of a large Martian sandbar, made of sediment, that billions of years ago was deposited by a river channel flowing into the lake that Jezero Crater once held. Perseverance took the images of the basin on April 22 (the 772nd Martian day, or sol, of the mission) while parked just west of Belva Crater’s rim on a light-toned rocky outcrop the mission’s science team calls “Echo Creek.” Created by a meteorite impact eons ago, the approximately 0.6-mile-wide (0.9-kilometer-wide) crater reveals multiple locations of exposed bedrock as well as a region where sedimentary layers angle steeply downward. On Mars, impact craters like Belva can provide a type of natural roadcut. On Earth, geology professors often take their students to visit highway “roadcuts” –places where construction crews have sliced vertically into the rock to make way for roads – that allow them to view rock layers and other geological features not visible at the surface. ![]() Impact craters can offer grand views and vertical cuts that provide important clues to the origin of these rocks with a perspective and at a scale that we don’t usually experience.” ![]() “That’s why our science team was so keen to image and study Belva. “Mars rover missions usually end up exploring bedrock in small, flat exposures in the immediate workspace of the rover,” said Katie Stack Morgan, deputy project scientist of Perseverance at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. Stitched into a dramatic mosaic, the results are not only eye-catching, but also provide the rover’s science team some deep insights into the interior of Jezero. The Mastcam-Z instrument aboard NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover recently collected 152 images while looking deep into Belva Crater, a large impact crater within the far larger Jezero Crater. The six-wheeled scientist encountered the crater during its latest science campaign in search of rock samples that could be brought to Earth for deeper investigation.
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