Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

This is old news, for those who have been following NASA’s Perseverance rover since before it left Earth, and it’s also not my find–my friend, colleague, and sometime co-author Brian Kraatz send me a heads-up about it this morning.

NASA posted the image above a couple of days ago, in a post called “Mastcam-Z looks at its calibration target“. If you zoom in, you can just make out a tiny silhouette of a sauropod on the ring around the MarsDial (what we call a sundial on Mars).

Here’s a much clearer pre-launch image from the Planetary Society (link), which helped design the calibration targets. Starting at about 7:00 and going around clockwise, there’s an image of the inner Solar System, with the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, then DNA, bacteria, a fern, a sauropod, humans (same silhouettes as on the Pioneer probes), a retro-style rocket ship, and finally a motto, “Two worlds, one beginning”, which may be a sly nod to the hypothesis that life in the inner Solar System started on Mars and was later seeded to Earth on meteorites–or possibly vice versa.

What’s with all this bling? It’s all about calibrating the cameras on Perseverance. The MarsDial gives the position and angle of the sun, and the colored dots help calibrate the color output of the cameras. There are other calibration targets for other cameras on board Perseverance, as well as some other technological ‘Easter eggs’ from the folks who designed and built the rover–read more about them here (link).

Perseverance is up there to explore “the potential of Mars as a place for life” (source), both past and future. Its four science objectives are:

1. Looking for Habitability: Identify past environments capable of supporting microbial life.
2. Seeking Biosignatures: Seek signs of possible past microbial life in those habitable environments, particularly in special rocks known to preserve signs of life over time.
3. Caching Samples: Collect core rock and “soil” samples and store them on the Martian surface. [For a future sample-return mission.–MJW]
4. Preparing for Humans: Test oxygen production from the Martian atmosphere.

Personally, I have my fingers firmly crossed that Perseverance finds something like this sticking out of a Martian rock:

(That one is actually from Utah, not Mars–see this post.) I don’t see any other way that my particular skill set is going to contribute to the exploration of the Solar System, which I’d really like to do. So I’ll wait, and watch Perseverance send back pictures, and wait some more. Sigh.

Anyway, there’s at least one sauropod on Mars, and that will have to do (for now!).

Bonus: if you haven’t watched the video of the rocket skycrane delivering the car-sized Perseverance to the surface of Mars, you need to. And if you have watched it, who cares, watch it again: