NASA's Perseverance rover has finally summitted the steep Martian crater where it landed more than three years ago to begin the next leg of its journey exploring the Red Planet.
The arduous climb, which took well over three months, was a journey filled with perilous obstacles - but also moments of discovery and awe as the six-wheeled robot stopped along the way to survey its surroundings.
All told, Perseverance's ascent covered 1,640 vertical feet and required navigating treacherous 20-degree slopes, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a press release last week. The rover then crested the top of Jezero Crater's rim Dec. 10 at a location NASA calls "Lookout Hill."
The milestone came at the same time as another NASA vehicle, its small Ingenuity helicopter that hitched a ride to Mars with Perseverance, was potentially given a new purpose following its final flight in January.
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The Perseverance rover has spent more than three years on Mars after a 200-day, 300-million-mile journey between from July 2020 to February 2021 to reach the Red Planet.
The craft's landing site was the bottom of Jezero Crater - believed to have formed by 3.9 billion years ago from a massive impact - where it has spent the ensuing years scouring the area's rocks and soil for evidence that life once existed on Mars.
Late in August, Perseverance began a slow ascent to the top of the crater, which scientists believe was once flooded with water. NASA had predicted that the rover would then crest the rim in early December to continue its hunt for more clues about past life on Mars.
"Our rover drivers have done an amazing job negotiating some of the toughest terrain we've encountered since landing," Steven Lee, Perseverance deputy project manager, said in a statement. "They developed innovative approaches to overcome these challenges - even tried driving backward to see if it would help - and the rover has come through it all like a champ."
Along the way to the Jezero summit, Perseverance stopped to capture images of the vast crater and some of the strange geology along the slopes of its western rim.
Late in August, Perseverance happened upon a strange, striped rock NASA calls the "zebra rock" that is theorized to have rolled downhill. Because the rock was unlike anything yet encountered on Mars, the team operating the rover from southern California had expressed hope that its discovery served as a sign of things to come.
Then in September, the Robot captured images from high above the Jezero Crater that revealed a striking vista of a sparse, rocky landscape marked by the rover's winding tracks. NASA released a stunning composite image of the sprawling terrain that painted a detailed picture of an area of the Red Planet that Perseverance has thoroughly explored.
The composite was compiled from a series of images Perseverance captured at roughly the halfway point of its ascent, using its Mastcam-Z cameras high on the rover's mast. Stitched together from 44 frames, the mosaic includes not only the rover's Feb. 18, 2021 landing site, but many other landmark locations that have come to define the Perseverance mission.
That includes the spot where Perseverance first found sedimentary rocks in 2022 and the location of the first depot on another planet where NASA and the European Space Agency can one day retrieve the rover's collected samples. The image also shows where the Ingenuity Mars helicopter completed its final flight in January - a location Perseverance imaged in February.
Ahead of Perseverance is a quarter-mile drive to another area where orbital data shows is rife with light-toned, layered bedrock, according to NASA.
In the next year, the rover is expected to visit as many as four sites in a span of four miles to collect samples along the northern part of the southwestern section of Jezero's rim.
"Perseverance is 'go' for everything the science team wants to throw at it during this next science campaign," Lee said in a statement.
The upcoming route marks a transition from rocks that partially filled the crater during its formation, to rocks from deep inside Mars that were thrown upward to form the rim after an impact, said Ken Farley, project scientist for Perseverance at Caltech in Pasadena.
The team also hopes to compare findings at the new site to an area where Perseverance in July discovered and sampled another unusual Martian rock nicknamed "Cheyava Falls" after a waterfall in the Grand Canyon. The rock, ringed with black and marked by distinctive white veins and dozens of tiny bright spots, was discovered as Perseverance explored a quarter-mile-wide valley called Neretva Vallis.
Because Cheyava Falls has chemical markings that could be the trace of life forms that existed when water ran freely through the area long ago, it offers compelling evidence that life once existed on Mars, NASA has said.
"These rocks represent pieces of early Martian crust and are among the oldest rocks found anywhere in the solar system," Farley said in a statement about the upcoming mission. "Investigating them could help us understand what Mars - and our own planet - may have looked like in the beginning."
Perseverance's research is intended to pave the way for humans to reach Mars in the years ahead under NASA's Artemis program, which will begin with astronauts returning to the moon to establish a base of operations. SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has also expressed his vision of beginning uncrewed trips of his own to the Red Planet before humans reach it ‒ perhaps as early as 2028.
Perseverance's historic ascent came at the same time as NASA revealed future plans for the Ingenuity helicopter it helped transport to Mars.
Ingenuity, famed as the first aircraft in history to make a powered, controlled flight on another planet, was rendered incapable of future flight after crashing Jan. 18 and damaging its rotor blade. Considered by the space agency as a 30-day technology demonstration of no more than five experimental test flights, the 4-pound chopper performed 72 flights for nearly three years at Mars.
But after conducting a review of Ingenuity's final flight, mission managers at JPL say the helicopter could serve another purpose on the Red Planet.
The helicopter continue to beam weather and avionics test data to the Perseverance rover about once a week, according to NASA. Because the weather information could benefit future explorers, engineers are already working on future designs of aircraft and other vehicles for the Red Planet.
Eric Lagatta covers breaking and trending news for USA TODAY. Reach him at [email protected]