NASA to Share Details of New Perseverance Mars Rover Finding

NASA will host a news conference at 11 a.m. EDT Wednesday, to discuss the analysis of a rock sampled by the agency’s Perseverance Mars rover last year, which is the subject of a forthcoming science paper. The agency previously announced this event as a teleconference. 

Watch the news conference on NASA’s YouTube channel and the agency’s website. Learn how to watch NASA content through a variety of platforms, including social media.

Participants include:

• Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy
• NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya
• Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters in Washington
• Lindsay Hays, senior scientist for Mars Exploration, Planetary Science Division, NASA Headquarters
• Katie Stack Morgan, Perseverance project scientist, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California
• Joel Hurowitz, planetary scientist, Stony Brook University, New York

To ask questions by phone, members of the media must RSVP no later than one hour before the start of the event to: rexana.v.vizza@jpl.nasa.gov. Media who registered for the earlier teleconference-only version of this event do not need to re-register. NASA’s media accreditation policy is available online.

The sample, called “Sapphire Canyon,” was collected in July 2024 from a set of rocky outcrops on the edges of Neretva Vallis, a river valley carved by water rushing into Jezero Crater long ago.

Since landing in the Red Planet’s Jezero Crater in February 2021, Perseverance has collected 30 samples. The rover still has six empty sample tubes to fill, and it continues to collect detailed information about geologic targets that it hasn’t sampled by using its abrasion tool. Among the rover’s science instruments is a weather station that provides environmental information for future human missions, as well as swatches of spacesuit material so that NASA can study how it fares on Mars.

Managed for NASA by Caltech, JPL built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover on behalf of the agency’s Science Mission Directorate as part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program portfolio.

To learn more about Perseverance visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/perseverance

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Bethany Stevens / Karen Fox
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
bethany.c.stevens@nasa.gov / karen.c.fox@nasa.gov

DC Agle
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-9011
agle@jpl.nasa.gov