On August 29, 2024, NASA’s Perseverance rover took its first selfie from the crater lake wall, where it began its ascent on August 19. During this challenging journey, the rover must climb to a height of 300 m above the crater floor level and roll over the edge. There, it will encounter many promising fragments and samples, many of which were left after a large meteorite fell here 4 billion years ago.

“Considering that [краї кратера] The sheer scope and diversity of rocks we expect to encounter and sample along the way make this perhaps the most ambitious campaign the team has undertaken to date.” – says NASA representatives in their statement regarding the fourth campaign in the rover’s scientific program.

The trek doesn’t promise to be easy. The NASA team doesn’t have detailed enough satellite imagery of the route, so the rover will rely more than ever on its own vision and intellect on its journey around the Red Planet. Vision will be even more essential for the rover to search for the most interesting samples for analysis. The slope could end there. It’s a nod to Mars’ distant geological past and a place at the intersection of eras — a prehistoric lake wall. The findings could be very interesting.

At the top, the rover team expects to discover cracks that have access to the surface of ancient rocks, as well as possible traces of Mars’ prehistoric biology, as well as fragments (remains) of an alien from space, such as a meteorite or asteroid that fell here about 4 billion years ago. This event led to the formation of the Lake crater and the subsequent formation of a lake inside it while Mars still had water.

The rover is carefully packing samples and interesting findings into titanium tubes, and NASA hopes to return them to Earth for analysis no later than 2033. None of this will happen anytime soon, or at all (NASA’s budget is woefully inadequate), but the rover’s journey to such distant places is already a fascinating one.