The rover would need no more than 50 days to travel to the canyon rim. Once there, it would anchor the end of a tether to the ground and, paying out the tether behind it, rappel into the six-kilometer-deep canyon.

The rover would slowly descend, reaching a depth of at least two kilometers in 200 days. It would halt its descent every meter to determine the composition of the rock layers making up the canyon wall using Raman and X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy and a multispectral camera. Every 100 meters, it would collect a five-centimeter-long rock core and analyze it to age-date the rock layers.