The United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket launches NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars.
PUBLISHED July 30, 2020
At 0750 ET, NASA’s Perseverance rover, bound for Mars, took off from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Rising skyward on an Atlas V rocket, Perseverance is preparing for its seven-month interplanetary flight. The rover’s goal: the Jezero crater, the site of an ancient crater lake and an ancient delta of a river that the rover will look for symptoms of life beyond Mars.
With its latest $2.4 billion robot heading for Mars, NASA plans to answer a question that has begged humanity since astronomers have pointed telescopes at the reddish world: is there, or ever, life on our neighboring planet?
“Our strategy is to look far back in time, at a time when we thought Mars and Earth were much more similar,” says deputy assignment scientist Ken Williford of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). “Studying Mars and its ancestral environments: what can we know about our position in the universe? Are we alone? Have we been alone?
In a blank room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, engineers observed the first of the Perserverence Mars rover.
But exploring Jezero might not be easy. The first test of perseverance will be a dangerous seven-minute dive into the fine Martian atmosphere, scheduled for February 18, 2021. Surviving this descent in dicy means relying on a heat shield, a parachute, a new navigation formula and a towering sky. crane that will lower the rover to Jezero’s floor, all without any intervention from the project controllers on Earth. Once grounded, Perseverance will deploy a small featherweight helicopter called Ingenuity, and the first few weeks of the Mars project, the small helicopter will notice whether the motorized flight in the thin air of Mars is within human reach.
“A vehicle to fly on Mars must be lightweight and must run very fast,” says MiMi Aung, Ingenuity’s assignment manager. Technologies such as composite fabrics and miniature electronics have become complex enough to attempt to fly.
After releasing Ingenuity, the Perseverance rover will focus on its main quest: to look for symptoms of ancient life in rocks and sediment scattered throughout the crater basin. Jezero would possibly be frozen and inhospiit today, however, scientists know that the environment was warm and watery at the beginning of the planet’s history, because the elements were formed through today’s liquids. The rover carries a set of complicated tools that will read over the crater rocks for biological fingerprints, and an additional set of equipment will allow Perseverance to collect and buy samples for a long-lasting rover to recover and return to Earth in the next decade.
“Having made a thorough decision on samples on Earth, even if they’re small, it will replace the way we do business,” says Sarah Stewart Johnson, a planetarium at Georgetown University who studies the biosignatures of ancient life. “And once we have those samples, we’ll have them forever,” allowing scientists to examine them in the long run with equipment that doesn’t yet exist.
Perseverance is NASA’s first Mars scout vehicle for the particular purpose of seeking life. If all goes according to plan, the nuclear-powered six-wheeled robot will nevertheless allow scientists to return to Earth to find out if Mars ever housed its own ecosystems, or to locate the life signatures that are obviously missing on the planet.
Perseverance was titled through Alex Mather, a seventh student from Northern Virginia, who believed the call captured an essential component of exploring excessive extraterrestrial environments. Now on the cusp of a project for once and for all if life may have been unusual on Mars, so-called Perseverance may not be more appropriate.
For decades, scientists have been looking for the bureaucracy of extraterrestrial life; however, the box of astrobiology has only recently a dominant science. Today, the box is booming. Perseverance is moving towards Mars, long-term missions target icy moons in the formula of the outer sun where life can thrive today, and labs on Earth are focusing on the origin of organisms on our own planet.
The Perseverence rover will land at Jezero Crater, shown in this symbol taken through NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. On ancient Mars, water dug canals and transported sediments to shape river deltas and lake basins. If life settles in those environments, scientists on the Perserverence rover will locate the lines you left on the rocks.
While perseverance’s team believes the rover will likely notice tantalizing, albeit definitive, evidence of Martian life, Katie Stack Morgan, an adjunct scientist in Mars 2020’s assignment at the JPL, says the election would be equally convincing.
“I’m sure when those samples come back, we’ll find compelling evidence of ancient life,” he says. “He deserves to be there, and if he’s not, he says something literally appealing about situations where life can exist on some other planet.”
This month, three spacecraft sailed for Mars. On July 19, the United Arab Emirates introduced its Hope orbiter and on July 23 the Chinese Tianwen-1 spacecraft took off.
The deep-area flotilla is the result of a favorable planetary alignment that occurs every 26 months, when Earth’s adventure to Mars can be undertaken with minimal fuel expenditure. If the existing coronavirus pandemic had been delayed at today’s launch, NASA would have had to buy perseverance safely (and costly) until the planets were covered in more than two years.
The spacecraft is an advanced, heavier edition of NASA’s Curiosity rover, which landed in Mars’ Gale Crater in 2012 and has been the ancient environment of the crater ever since.
Weighing 2,260 pounds, with 3.5 miles of cable wrapped in his belly, Perseverance carries seven clinical instruments, 43 pattern tubes, the first microphone to fly to Mars and nearly two dozen cameras. Some promises from humanity also make the journey, adding a plaque commemorating the paintings of medical networks, paintings of the existing pandemic and a Morse code message with the names of 11 million Earthlings who sent their names to NASA.
After entering the environment at 20,000 km/h, deploying a parachute and then destroying the heat shield, Perseverance will have his first look at Mars. As it heads to the surface, the rover will activate a camera formula that will allow it to detect hazards autonomously near your landing site, such as rocks, slopes or sand straightmen that can thwart the mission.
“This is the first project to land with your eyes open,” says JPL’s Swati Mohan, a leading guidance, navigation and project systems engineer. “Basically, we added a brain to the rover to do that.”
For 10 to 15 seconds, Says Mohan, the rover will furiously take pictures of the terrain in the race, advised by detailed maps on board. The formula will then autonomously align the rover’s view with the required hazards and perseverance of the consultant to a point in its landing ellipse, approximately six miles wide.
“This is a region that is more damaging than all the ones we’ve landed in in the recent past,” Mohan says. “But the perseverance of landing safely is more than 99%.”
Once the dust settles, the rover will begin to explore the world’s dry lake.
Announced as the rover’s destination in 2018, the 30-mile-wide Jezero crater houses a vast branched river delta that formed when water flowed into an ancient crater lake and deposited sediments in its soil, just the kind of that can involve records. living organisms.
“Deltas are to preserve biological matter and other types of biosignatures,” Tanja Bosak of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of perseverance’s clinical team said in a call with reporters.
Ancient Mars didn’t have a smart look like the planet we see today. Data from many rovers and orbiters, which add detailed topographic maps, mineral studies and other studies, suggest that in its first billion years, Mars was involved in a thick and at least periodically warm and humid environment, a planetary oasis similar to its Earth’s neighbor.
In fact, until about 3.5 billion years ago, abundant lakes and rivers accumulated and flowed to the planet’s surface. Today, we can see manual liquid paints in valleys carved through rivers, pebbles carved into streams, minerals forming in water and piles of sediment deposited in basins and deltas.
Jezero, which is about 3.8 billion years old, meaning “lake” in Serbian and named after the city of Bosnia and Herzegovina, was filled with more than 250 meters of water. At nearly 4 billion years old, the rocks at the rim of the crater are among the oldest in the region and the rocks in its basin are about 500 million years younger. By searching for the rock register covering such a wide period of time, scientists can glimpse monumental replacement in the Martian planetary climate. The dry lake examination will also provide a new tool to identify the ages of other regions of Mars, which lately is estimated to be based on the number of surrounding craters.
Ken Williford, a perseverance assignment scientist, says the rover is most likely to notice rocks that, even if studied remotely, will “astonish” us.
In Jezero, clays called smectitas can include records of complex biological compounds, and carbonate deposits are scattered throughout the basin, precisely the type of rock that preserves the oldest signatures of life on Earth. Scientists claim that if the chemistry of the lake were correct, those carbonates could be similar to structures called stromatolites, which are layers formed through alternating spots of microbes and muddy biological matter that record the presence of life on Earth dating back 3.5 billion years.
But even on this planet, it’s hard to know if a fossil comprises lines of microbial activity.
“We still have massive debates about what life is when we push back to the rock record as we go back to The Crater rock record,” says Stewart Johnson.
In the ancient layers of Martian sediments, Perseverance will look for high-resolution camera tracks from ancient populations and two clinical tools designed to deeply scan the rocks. Called PIXL and SHERLOC, these equipment in the robot arm will capture detailed data on how the elements, minerals and biological compounds are distributed in the Martian rock.
“Life tends to be irregular,” Williford says. Stromatolites on Earth have layers rich in biological matter interspersed between layers of biological matter, so locating similar patterns on Mars would be a strong sign of life.
However, the project’s most productive chance of obviously identifying life would possibly come from the rock samples it collects over a long period of time and returns to Earth. The rover will fill about 3 dozen reflective heat tubes with approximately 15 grams of rock core to recover a long-term rover, a joint project between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) that is now expected to be introduced in 2026 and I will not be back before. 2031.
“We have many difficult lab techniques here that can decode a lot of data about the old surroundings from an unmarried grain of sand,” Williford says.
On Earth, these samples will be studied for biosignatures, adding molecular complexity, isotopic carbon proportions and metabolic by-products.
“Mars was habitable; however, there remains this wonderful question about whether life has taken root and, if so, is it still there?” Stewart Johnson says. “Despite everything, we are looking for biosignatures or lifelines.”
While the search for life is one of the rover’s main goals, it also includes new technologies that can facilitate human navigation and survival in the icy and almost airless environment of Mars. One of them is a tool called MOXIE that will convert the destructive carbon dioxide into oxygen, a resource for any habitable environment.
“Once scaled, this type of capability can be used to supply oxygen that can only be for Mars structures and used to make the fuel and rocket propellant that astronauts can bring back to Earth,” Stack Morgan explains.
Another novelty is Ingenuity, the four-pound helicopter located under the rover’s belly. The ship, designed to fly in the steamy Martian air, targets the first vehicle to perform a motorized flight on some other planet, adding an air size to the exploration of the area.
The helicopter’s two carbon fiber counter-rotating propellers are approximately 4 feet long and rotate 2,400 times per minute, faster than any helicopter on Earth. The ingenuity will bring in multiple cameras while conducting autonomous flight tests for the first 30 days of the rover’s mission.
Lately, the team is analyzing the main points of the helicopter’s flight plans, with an initial 20-second tour that the ship will check. If the first flight goes well, 4 complex flights are being prepared, checks that can validate long-haul Martian aircraft for navigation, detection and pattern collection.
“The purpose is flight data,” Aung says. “How does an air vehicle on Mars work, remotely, from Earth? This is all a learning experience.”
As far as Mars is concerned, humans have had to be more informed about the planet from afar. But as helicopters, rovers and rock samples reveal more of their secrets, we may nonetheless perceive how habitable the global was once, and how we could inhabit it ourselves in the future.