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The United Launch Alliance Atlas five rocket with the Mars Rover takes off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Base in Florida.
The dry, dusty Mars we know today is very different in the deep past. Humanity’s last rover heads to a region of Mars that once housed a lake, a very good position to look for symptoms of ancient microbes.
Since Sojourner in 1997, NASA has sent a succession of increasingly sophisticated wheeled explorers to Mars. Perseverance is the latest and greatest and in July 2020, it launched on an epic journey across space.
Perseverance will do much more than snap amazing images of Mars. These are some of the key mission objectives:
The project is expected to last at least a year on Mars, which equates to about 687 days on Earth (Mars takes longer to circle the Sun). However, NASA has a track record of extending its robot projects to Mars. We can take a look at the old Opportunity and Curiosity rovers as models for this.
NASA has conducted extensive tests of the parachute formula that will persevere on Mars.
The rover is scheduled to reach Mars on February 18, 2021. The contact procedure will include some of the maximum arduous minutes of the entire mission.
Perseverance will be able to verify a new approach that NASA expects to deliver as close to its target landing site as possible. NASA calls it the “Range Trigger” strategy and it’s about deploying the parachutes at the right time.
“If the spacecraft exceeded the landing target, the parachute would be deployed earlier,” NASA said. “If it fell below the target, the parachute would deploy later, after the spacecraft flew a little closer to its target.”
Earth observers can expect an unprecedented view of the process of entry, descent, and contact. The project is supplied with cameras and a microphone to capture all the excitement and tension as NASA tries to gently land perseverance on the surface of Mars.
This Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter symbol shows the Jezero Crater Delta region.
Jezero Crater is just north of the Mars equator and once housed a river delta. This history of water makes it a privileged position to look for symptoms that go beyond microbial life. Sounds like the ideal contact site for a clinical lab on wheels.
“The landing site in Jezero Crater offers geologically rich terrain, with reliefs of up to 3.6 billion years, that could answer vital questions about planetary evolution and astrobiology,” said NASA’s Thomas Zurbuchen when the site announced it in 2018.
The Perseverance rover, the size of a car, looks a lot like its predecessor, Curiosity, but it also represents some technological advances since Curiosity’s design. Here are the numbers:
Length: 10 feet (3 meters) Weight: 2260 lbs (1025 kilograms) Wheels: Six aluminum wheels with titanium spokes Maximum speed: only 0.1 mile consistent with the hour (152 meters consistent with the hour)
The Perseverance rover comes with tools that you’ll use to investigate the Jezero crater on Mars.
Perseverance is loaded with seven tools selected to achieve your project’s goals. You can get a full review of NASA, but here are some highlights:
Mastcam-Z: The camera formula fixed on the rover mast is for the eyes on the head. According to NASA, its main task is to “take high-definition videos, panoramic colors and three-dimensional photographs of the Martian surface and atmospheric features with a zoom lens to enlarge remote lenses.” The mastcam will be our main display window in Jezero Crater.
Moxie: The Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment is one of the ways Perseverance is helping to prepare humans to go to Mars. This instrument is designed to make oxygen from the carbon-dioxide atmosphere. This capability will be necessary to help future human explorers breathe, but it would also help us make propellant for rockets right on site. That’s a necessary step for bringing our Mars astronauts back to Earth after their missions.
SuperCam: When you assemble a camera, laser and spectrometers, you get SuperCam, a tool that will look for biological compounds, a key detail in the search for symptoms beyond microbial life. “It can identify the chemical and mineral composition of targets as small as the tip of a pencil at a distance of more than 20 feet (7 meters),” NASA said.
Sherloc: “Sweeping habitable environments with Raman – Luminescence for Organics – Chemicals” or Sherloc, as it is affectionately known, will look for symptoms of life on the red planet. The tool and its significant camera (nicknamed Watson) are able to take microscopic photographs of Mars and analyze them. Equipped with a laser that can fire on the surface, Sherloc can measure chemicals on the ground and balance a strategy known as spectroscopy.
The NASA Mars helicopter team attaches a piece to the flight model in early 2019.
“Send a helicopter to Mars” may seem a little exaggerated, but NASA does it anyway. The wit, a small helicopter designed to work in the harsh situations of the red planet, is located in the abdomen of the rover, where he will make the journey.
The helicopter will make the first attempt at powered flight on another planet. NASA hopes Ingenuity soars and becomes a model for a new way to investigate other worlds.
Check out this video for more on how this little chopper could change the way we approach space exploration.
NASA has recently had two machines operating on the surface of Mars, the InSight constant landing and the Mars Curiosity rover. InSight is in a domain called Elysium Planitia, a vast domain of plains. Curiosity sails around Gale Crater, a giant ditch with a large mountain inside. Perseverance will explore a very different component of the planet as it continues the legacy of NASA’s Mars exploration.
The last time we had two functional rovers on Mars was in 2018 when the Opportunity rover lost contact with its home due to the effect of a global dust storm. Perseverance will not have the same upheaval as Opportunity. Like Curiosity, it uses a nuclear power source that doesn’t want sunlight to make it work.
This plaque contains the names of about 11 million more people and carries a coded message.
Perseverance will be a long way from Earth, but it will carry poignant remembrances of its home planet. Over 10.9 million people signed up to have their names travel with the rover through NASA’s Send Your Name to Mars public outreach program. The names are etched on small silicon chips that NASA installed on the rover on an aluminum plate underneath a protective shield.
The plate also bears an illustration of the Earth, our sun and Mars. Hidden in the sun’s rays is the message “explore as one,” written in Morse code.
A separate aluminum plate will pay tribute to physical care personnel and their efforts to help humanity to the coronavirus pandemic. This plate carries a representation of a snake wrapped around a stem with the Earth on top.
These names and messages are a reminder that NASA’s robotic explorers never truly travel alone. Perseverance is the culmination of years of effort from NASA, but it’s also an emissary for humanity, an extension of our curiosity and sense of wonder and a little bit of Earth on Mars.