NASA’s Perseverance Rover Reads Record of Ancient Mars Impacts - UNIVERSE

NASA’s Perseverance took this selfie at “Witch Hazel Hill” on Jezero Crater’s rim on May 10, 2025. The small dark hole in the rock in front of the rover is the borehole made when the rover collected the “Bell Island” sample. The small puff of dust left of center and below the horizon line is a dust devil.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has uncovered evidence that a 245-foot-thick (75-meter-thick) stack of ancient rock on the rim of Jezero Crater was built by repeated asteroid impacts. Referred to as the “Broom Point member” by the rover’s science team, this sequence of layered bedrock is likely more than 3.9 billion years old, making it among the oldest terrain ever examined by a Mars rover.  

Released Wednesday in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, the findings offer a window into one of the most tumultuous chapters in the history of the solar system.  

“Since leaving Jezero, Perseverance has been exploring a brand-new frontier, both geographically and geologically — a chapter of Martian time that predates the crater itself,” said Ken Farley, Perseverance deputy project scientist at Caltech in Pasadena, California. “On Earth, our earliest geologic history has been fundamentally broken up, deformed, and erased by plate tectonics. Because Mars lacks plate tectonics to recycle its crust, this ancient record remains intact, giving us a rare glimpse into a geological time period that doesn’t exist on our own planet.” 

Reading between layers 

After ascending the western rim of Jezero Crater in late 2024, Perseverance began examining surrounding locations with its science instruments. Their data at Broom Point revealed six distinct rock types, including breccias — rocks composed of angular fragments — alternating with layers of fine-grained, pulverized rock dust. Rock fragments within the breccias are pocked with gas-bubble cavities, indicating they were once molten. 

The presence of tiny, dark, glassy beads within the layers offered an important clue about how these rocks formed. While volcanoes can produce similar glassy droplets, they rarely occur in such high abundance, pointing to asteroid impacts, instead, as the primary architect. In fact, the largest beads rival those flung out by the dinosaur-killing Chicxulub asteroid’s impact on Earth. 

NASA’s Perseverance rover captured its own tracks descending from the rim of Jezero Crater. The bright-colored rocks running from middle left to middle right of the image, a formation dubbed the “Broom Point member,” are likely more than 3.9 billion years old, making them among the oldest terrain ever examined by a Mars rover.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS

The repetition of these distinct rock types multiple times throughout this thick sequence of rock indicates that high-energy impact events happened again and again across this region of early Mars. 

“The different rock layers are a record of variable-sized impacts occurring at different distances from where this rock sequence was accumulating,” said Alex Jones, a Ph.D. student in planetary geology at Imperial College London and lead author of the paper. “Some large impacts took place very far away, some small impacts nearby. Their debris all ended up landing here, constructing this thick section of rock.”  

How these layers formed may suggest an interaction with water or ice. Several of the layers look like they may have been formed by fast, ground-hugging debris flows. On Earth, these powerful, fluidlike surges can occur when molten rock hits water or ice that instantly flashes into steam.  

Cosmic one-two punch 

Some of Broom Point’s layers tilt at angles exceeding 80 degrees — nearly vertical — which is far too steep to be caused by the impact that created Jezero Crater.  

Instead, scientists suspect a cosmic “one-two punch” shaped this landscape long ago. First, a colossal asteroid impact created the 1,200-mile-wide (1,900-kilometer-wide) Isidis Basin, one of the largest impact basins on Mars, upending and tilting the once-flat rock layers. Later, a second asteroid likely struck, forming Jezero Crater, which measures 28 miles (45 kilometers) across. This second impact fractured and uplifted the already-tilted rocks into the dramatic formations the rover sees today.  

To pin down exactly when these events took place, the Perseverance team collected two core samples, dubbed “Bell Island” and “Main River.” If a future mission were to return them to Earth, laboratory dating could determine when and how often impacts were occurring on early Mars — and, by extension, the infant Earth, whose own early impact record has been erased by billions of years of plate tectonics. 

“During this violent era, it wasn’t rain or snow falling from the sky, but an almost constant barrage of molten rock droplets and pulverized dust kicked up by asteroid impacts,” said Jones. “If we can pin down the ages of these layers, it would be like reading a cosmic weather report from 4 billion years ago.” 

This orbital map shows the path NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover took from its 2021 landing site in Jezero Crater to the “Broom Point” location in mid-2025.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/MRO/HIRISE/UA/ICL

More about Perseverance 

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which is managed for the agency by Caltech, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover on behalf of the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, as part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program portfolio. Arizona State University leads the operations of the rover’s Mastcam-Z instrument, working in collaboration with Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, on the design, fabrication, testing, and operation of the cameras. SuperCam is led by Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where the instrument’s Body Unit was developed. The rover’s SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals) instrument was built at NASA JPL, and its WATSON (Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering) camera was built at Malin Space Science Systems.

For more information on NASA’s Perseverance, visit: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/mars-2020-perseverance 

Source: NASA’s Perseverance Rover Reads Record of Ancient Mars Impacts - NASA

Battery-like device pulls CO₂ from air using electricity and saltwater chemistry - Energy & Green Tech

U. of I. engineers Paul Rozzi, professor Kyle Smith and Jeong Le have developed a new battery-type device that captures CO₂ from the air. Credit: Michelle Hassel

Engineers have developed a new way to pull carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere using a process similar to charging and discharging a battery—an advance that could help address the planet's excess CO₂ problem.

A new collaborative study between scientists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Toyota focuses on direct air capture, a technology designed to reduce new emissions and remove CO₂ that has already accumulated in the atmosphere. Instead of using heat to absorb and release CO₂, as many carbon capture methods do, the new method uses electricity and water-based chemistry within an electrochemical device.

The results of the study by mechanical engineering and science professor Kyle Smith, Illinois graduate students Paul Rozzi and JeongA Lee, and Chip Roberts and Tim Arthur from the Toyota Research Institute of North America are published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

Targeting carbon already in the air

Most climate scientists agree that even with aggressive cuts in current emissions, the world is unlikely to meet climate targets without also removing some of the CO₂ that has already accumulated over decades. Most current carbon capture technologies work at point sources—places like power plant smokestacks where CO₂ emissions are high.

"Point source methods are important, but they don't deal with the vast amount of CO₂ already mixed into the air at much lower concentrations," Smith said. "Our work is aimed at that legacy problem."

A pH swing powered by electricity

A key advance of this work is the device's use of specialized potassium-stabilized manganese dioxide electrodes and a specific method for moving charged particles. In the lab, the team uses an electrochemical cell to change the pH of a saltwater solution. In one step, the solution is made more alkaline, allowing it to absorb CO₂ from the air effectively. In another step, the solution is made less alkaline again, which causes the CO₂ to bubble back out in a purified form, ready for storage or reuse.

"What's innovative about our work is that we use proton-intercalation electrodes in what we call a cation-compensated cell," Smith said. "That design lets us operate in an alkaline range where CO₂ is much more soluble, which is crucial for making direct air capture practical."

Designing the cycle for efficiency

To make the system as efficient as possible, the team treated the process much like a classical thermodynamic cycle, in the spirit of the cycles engineers use to design power plants. Instead of thinking in terms of pressure and volume, the team mapped out the cycle using dissolved inorganic carbon and potassium ion concentrations in the solution.

"By framing our process as a thermodynamic cycle in this particular space, we could see where energy was being wasted and how to redesign the cycle," Lee said.

Mixing losses remain a hurdle

While the early results are promising, the team said there is still work to do before this technology can be deployed on a large scale. For example, the device uses two liquid streams that ideally should remain separate. In practice, some mixing occurs when flows are switched, reducing efficiency.

"Interstream mixing is one of the biggest issues we're dealing with now," Rozzi said. "If we can limit that mixing or design around it, we can significantly improve both energy consumption and productivity."

"Our work with Professor Smith and the U. of I. team on electrochemical direct air capture provides useful insights into how materials, electrochemistry and process design can be combined to address challenging CO₂ separation problems," Roberts said. "This type of early-stage research supports Toyota's broader effort to explore innovative pathways toward long-term decarbonization." 

Provided by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 

by Lois Yoksoulian, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

edited by Gaby Clark, reviewed by Andrew Zinin 

Source: Battery-like device pulls CO₂ from air using electricity and saltwater chemistry