Launched on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from space launch complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Base in Florida, the rover will also test new technologies for human and long-term robot exploration of Mars.
“Today’s last critical step has been taken, the acquisition of the sign. Essentially, Perseverance called home to inform us that he is officially on his journey to Mars,” the U.S.-area firm said in a statement.
The rover will land at Jezero Crater on Mars on February 18, 2021.
“This means that the remote area network of the JPL (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory) has been locked in the spacecraft, which is on its mars adventure,” said Omar Baez, director of NASA’s release program, the agency’s release program.
“Everything seems to pass nominally. Today’s count was perfect.”
The project, designed to better perceive the geology and climate of Mars and look for symptoms of ancient life on the red planet, will use the clinical robot, which weighs just under 1043 kg and has the length of a small car, to collect and purchase a set of rock and soil samples that can be returned to Earth through long-term project sample returns to Mars.
Perseverance will also bring a separate technological experiment to the surface of Mars: a helicopter called Ingenuity, the first aircraft to fly in a controlled manner on the planet.
NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance is part of America’s larger Moon to Mars exploration approach that includes missions to the Moon as a way to prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.
NASA said its construction of the Perseverance rover in the classes of other rovers on Mars.
The first U.S. area agency rover. On Mars it was modest: Sojourner, the length of a microwave oven, demonstrated in 1997 that a robot can simply move around the red planet.
See also: NASA plans two spacewalks this month to the ISS
NASA’s upcoming Mars scout vehicles, Spirit and Opportunity, were the length of a golf cart. After landing in 2004, they found evidence that the planet once housed running water before fitting into an icy desert.
The car-sized Curiosity rover landed in 2012. Curiosity discovered that its landing site, Gale Crater, was home to a lake billions of years ago and an environment that may have sustained microbial life.