“Persistence sets a new standard for our ambitions on Mars,” said Lori Glaze, director of planetary science at NASA’s Washington headquarters. “We will be closer than ever to the answer to some of the oldest science questions on the red planet, especially if life was ever born there.”
What drives the Perseverance project and what will it do on the planet? Here are seven things to know:
1. The Perseverance rover relies on the spirit of NASA, and on scientists, to meet the challenges.
The rover has a difficult mission. Not only will you have to land on a treacherous planet, but you’ll have to paint on your clinical goals: look for symptoms of ancient microbial life, characterize the geology and climate of the planet, gather conscientiously in rocks and sediments. Long-term samples return to Earth and pave the way for human exploration beyond the Moon.
These activities illustrate why NASA chose the so-called Perseverance of the 28,000 tests presented in the “Name the Rover” competition. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the months leading up to the launch in specific artistic resolution required, teamwork and determination.
“Building this incredibly complicated rover is the hardest thing that has worried me as an engineer,” said Ray Baker, director of the mission flight formula at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “While the coronavirus has added significant and demanding situations and logistics, the team has demonstrated a wonderful determination and diligence in building a rover that we can be proud to send to Mars. We took a look to see the many years of determination bearing fruit on the launch pad.”
2. Perseverance is based on the classes of Martian rovers.
NASA’s modest first rover, Sojourner, demonstrated in 1997 that a robot can move around the red planet. Spirit and Opportunity, which landed in 2004, discovered evidence that the planet once housed running water before fitting into an icy desert. Curiosity, who has been exploring Mars since 2012, discovered that its landing site, Gale Crater, was home to a lake billions of years ago, with an environment that could have sustained microbial life.
Perseverance aims to take the next step, seeking, as its main goal, one of the key questions of astrobiology: are there symptoms that life ever existed on Mars?
3. The rover will be landing in a place with high potential for finding signs of past microbial life.
Jezero crater is forty-five kilometers wide and is located on the western edge of Isidis Planitia, a giant basin just north of the Martian equator that dug long ago when a rock in the area hit the surface. Some time ago, between 3 and four billion years ago, in Jezero, a river flows into a water frame along Lake Tahoe.
“The clinical team has had a lot of internal and external discussions about the fate of the next rover on Mars,” said Ken Farley, a mission scientist, founded at Caltech in Pasadena. “Despite everything, we chose Jezero Crater because it is a very promising position to locate biological molecules and other potential symptoms of microbial life.”
4. Perseverance will also gather knowledge about the geology and climate of Mars.
Mars orbiters have collected photographs and other knowledge of The Jezero crater about two hundred miles (322 kilometers) high, however, locating the symptoms of ancient life on the surface will require much more inspection. This requires a rover like perseverance, which can look for symptoms that would possibly be life-like and can analyze the context in which they were discovered to see if they were of biological origin.
Understanding climatic situations beyond Mars and reading the geological history embedded in its rocks will also give us a concept of why Earth and Mars, which formed from the same primordial, ended up being so different.
5. Perseverance is the first step in a circular to Mars.
Verifying ancient microscopic life on Mars carries an enormous burden of proof. Perseverance is the first rover to bring a sample-gathering system to Mars that will package promising examples of rocks and sediments for return to Earth by a future mission.
A Mars Sample Return campaign is being planned by NASA and the European Space Agency because here on Earth we can investigate the samples with instruments too large and complex to send to Mars. Terrestrial laboratories would be used to establish whether any potential signs of life detected by the rover are definitive evidence of past life.
6. Perseverance carries instruments and technology that will pave the way for human missions to the Moon and Mars.
The field-related navigation system, which autonomously helps the rover avoid the dangers of landing, and the Mars Science Laboratory (MEDLI2), which collects very important knowledge about travel in the Martian atmosphere, will help for a long time. executing human missions lands more safely and with higher payloads on other worlds.
Perseverance also has features that will help astronauts once they are on the surface of some other world: increased autonomous driving intelligence for greater effectiveness and the Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA) toolkit, which will provide key data on climate, weather and dust. . Meanwhile, the demonstration of the Mars Oxygen Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) aims to produce oxygen from mars’ carbon dioxide atmosphere, demonstrating how long explorers can produce oxygen for rocket reinforcement and breathing.
7. You can go on.
The Perseverance rover and other parts of the Mars 2020 spacecraft feature 23 cameras, more cameras than any interplanetary project in history. They will help engineers create a high-definition view of the contact procedure after the rover safely lands on Mars on February 18, 2021, and provide landscape photographs and clinical samples with impressive details. And as with pre-Mars projects, Mars plans to take raw and processed photographs that will be held on the project’s website.