Perseverance’s Quadrant Themes

This map shows various quadrant themes in the vicinity of NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover, which is currently in the Rocky Mountain quadrant within the much broader Jezero Crater. Each quadrant is 0.7 miles (1.2 kilometers) on each side.

Figure A shows the same image without annotations.

The Perseverance team chose quadrant themes related to various national parks across Earth, from Shenandoah National Park in Virginia to Jotunheimen National Park in Norway. The themes help organize the unofficial nicknames that are given by rover team members to different surface features they want to study, such as hills, craters, boulders, and even specific rock surfaces. The first sedimentary rock core sample the rover took was from a rock nicknamed “Skinner Ridge” for a ridge in Shenandoah National Park when Perseverance was in that quadrant. Many hundreds of names are compiled into a list based on each theme and are applied as the rover explores that quadrant. Rovers can sometimes end up exploring a quadrant for months, exhausting the list of names and prompting a new list to be drawn up.

A key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust).

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.

JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.

For more about Perseverance:
mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/