SANTA FE - Perseverance landed on Mars this week by way of New Mexico.
After NASA s latest expedition to the Red Planet culminated Thursday with the touchdown of the Perseverance rover, Santa Fe-based geologist Larry Crumpler will be mapping terrain and collecting samples with technology developed in part at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
After taking a few weeks to settle, Perseverance will roll toward where scientists believe a river flowed into a lake long ago and that s when Crumpler and other scientists say things will really get interesting. We re pretty sure at one point in time, maybe around 3.5 billion years ago, it was a lake, and where this large river entered it, there s this big, beautiful delta like we see here on Earth, said Crumpler, a geologist and volcanologist at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science who will be working as a field geologist during the mission in a field some 126 million miles away.