Washington, July 30 (IANS) NASA unveiled the Perseverance Mars 2020 rover on Thursday, which will seek, as its main goal, one of the key questions of astrobiology: are there prospective symptoms of microbial life beyond or biofirms on the red planet? ?
Launched on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from the 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 the area to inform us that it is officially on its journey to Mars,” the US-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 blocked on the spacecraft, which is heading for Mars,” said NASA’s director of communiqués, Omar Baez, of the agency’s release program.
“Everything turns out to be by nominal. Today’s count was perfect.”
Designed to better perceive the geology and climate of Mars and look for symptoms of ancient life on the red planet, the project will use the clinical robot, which weighs just under 1043 kg and has the length of a small car, to collect and buy a set of rock and soil samples that can return to Earth through long-term verification projects to Mars.
Perseverance will also bring a technological distinction 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 a component of America’s largest technique for exploring the Moon to Mars, including missions to the Moon 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.
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.
–IANS
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