The largest and most complex rover ever sent to Mars is already on its way. NASA’s Perseverance rover was effectively introduced on July 30, the third of 3 projects on Mars to be presented in just 10 days. The rover will be the first project to try to collect rock samples to return to Earth; It will also look for symptoms of ancient extraterrestrial life, launch the first helicopter on the red planet, and use microphones to capture the sounds of Mars for the first time.
The rover exploded in the sky over Cape Canaveral, Florida, aboard an Atlas V rocket at 7:50 a.m. local time. The launch follows the Orbiter Mars Hope of the United Arab Emirates, which took off on July 20, and China’s Tianwen-1 rover, unveiled three days later. All three benefited from a favorable alignment between Earth’s orbits and Mars for a fuel-efficient journey.
From now on, Perseverance will sail through the area for approximately seven months, with the aim of landing at the Jezero crater on Mars on February 18, 2021. If it reaches the surface safely, the $2.7 billion plutonium-powered rover will spend at least one. March of the year, approximately two land years, exploring a landscape where an ancient river spilled into a lake that may have housed Martian life.
In addition to searching the riverbed and the shores of the lake for fossilized life, Perseverance will check if astronauts can produce oxygen from the red planet’s atmosphere. But, more importantly, it will fill the tubes of Martian rock and soil so that a spacecraft yet to be built can return to Earth one day, in what would be the first pattern back from Mars.
“Persistence is going to do a lot for us,” says Kennda Lynch, an astrobiologist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas.
The device is a reinforced edition of the Curiosity rover, which captured the global when it landed on Mars 8 years ago in a scathing 7-minute maneuver. After an adventure of about 500 million kilometers, Perseverance will touch the Martian environment traveling about 19,500 kilometers consisting of an hour. It will deploy a parachute and then a “heavenly crane” formula, similar to that used through Curiosity, which will pull the rockets to slow down as you approach the planet’s surface. Unlike Curiosity, the spacecraft has an autopilot formula to stumble upon obstacles like giant rocks and take it to safety.
Once perseverance is achieved, engineers will spend about 90 days remotely checking all their systems to make sure they are working properly. The rover is unlikely to start rolling seriously until May, when it will launch itself on its six wheels to explore the Jezero crater, about 3750 kilometres from the Curiosity landing site.
Jezero “lake” in several Slavic languages. More than 3.8 billion years ago, a river flowed into the 45-kilometer-wide crater and the waters of the lake filled it1. Photographs recommend that along the crater’s edge, carbonate minerals were deposited and hardened into the rock2. This is exciting because on Earth, ancient carbonated rocks involve some of the oldest known life evidence, adding fossilized bacterial mats called stromatolites3.
If Martian life ever existed, Jezero’s carbonates are a smart position to look for them. “We’ve never explored an environment like this before,” says Tanja Bosak, a geobiologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at Cambridge, which is running the mission. Evidence of life can take the form of genuine fossils or chemical or geological signatures of organisms that once lived on the rocks.
The rover is full of tools that make it a real box geologist, and indeed international. They come with a pair of zoom cameras that can detect a fly on the other side of a sports box; a Spanish-built weather station; a radar built in Norway to scan the soil and rock layers beneath the planet’s surface; and a complex edition of a laser tool on Curiosity, which will explore the rocks to examine their chemical composition. “Who doesn’t like a camera with a rock-hitting laser?” Says John Grunsfeld, a former NASA astronaut who led the progression of perseverance when he led the agency’s scientific workplace from 2012 to 2016.
Perseverance is also a pioneer because it has two microphones, which will not only reveal the winds and other sounds of Mars for the first time, but will also pay attention to engineering disorders on engines or wheels, Grunsfeld says. And it has a 1.8 kilogram helicopter called Ingenuity, which you can deploy to point out where the rover can. If the project is successful, Ingenuity will be the first shipment to perform a controlled flight on some other planet.
But Perseverance’s workhorse is his robotic arm, which can be stretched to read on rocks up close, then extract samples and store them in tubes in the rover’s belly. The assignment will buy those samples until a spacecraft can retrieve them and bring them back to Earth. Perseverance carries 43 tubes, “and we’ll use them all in the search for about 30 or 35 very intelligent samples,” says Ken Farley, a geologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and an assigned scientist for the task. NASA and the European Space Agency plan to bring these rocks to Earth until 2031 so that scientists can study them in complicated laboratories; only a small part of the investment has yet to be committed.
“The return of the samples will be the first time we will circulate to Mars,” Grunsfeld says. “It’s vital because it’s a metaphor for flying in a human area. Most astronauts who pass to Mars will have to return.”
As a component of this long-term exploration, the rover will use one of its tools to check oxygen production from Mars’ carbon dioxide atmosphere. Perhaps long-term human astronauts can do the same, produce oxygen to breathe, or produce rocket fuel to get home.
The COVID-19 pandemic has not facilitated the last months of perseverance on Earth. In March, when the pandemic hit the United States, the spacecraft was in Florida in preparation for its launch, but most of its engineers were in California at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. When staff needed to travel to Florida to help with the newer arrangements, NASA used some of its firm aircraft to send them so they wouldn’t have to threaten to be exposed to the coronavirus via commercial flights.
Nature 584, 15-16 (2020)
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