I’m a Co-Investigator with Mastcam-Z and MEDA (Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer) on the Mars 2020 mission, working as a researcher at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. I’ve been lucky to work on the Galileo mission to Jupiter, Mars Pathfinder, the twin Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity, and the currently active Mars Science Laboratory rover, Curiosity. Time “Earth-side” has included gaining scientific perspectives from experiments in wind tunnels, and from geologic field work in California, New Mexico, Colorado, Washington, Utah, Scotland, and Iceland.
For the March 2020 strategic planning exercise, I participated in the “Atmosphere” organization (while seeking to stick to the deliberations of several of the other teams as well). Immediately after landing, all team members will feel the strain of temporarily collecting a complete “hideout” of sealed samples representing the maximum vital tissues in the Jezero crater domain, a clinical price high enough to ensure a return to Earth later through the top. project (a top bar to reach). The clock will spin noisily in our ears, of course, as soon as the rover’s six wheels touch the Martian surface for the first time.
As you can guess, the paintings of the Atmosphere organization were a little different from those of the other teams, focusing on basic problems that are applicable to a giant component of the Martian surface, not only near the landing domain of the Jezero crater. Examples: how strong winds blow in the thin Martian environment to lift dust in a dust storm, or to blow sand along the surface to form waves and dunes widely visible on the Martian surface? What combination of perseverance camera observations and wind speed measurements can answer those long-standing questions? In fact, other strategic teams have also done their job of leveraging Jezero’s science to address basic giant-scale problems on Mars. Clinical netpaintings expect this, and so does the public. This is because our neighboring planet is so difficult to access, that it is visited very rarely and our explorations so far have been incredibly limited, which makes our time to surface with perseverance valuable for many reasons.
The “cross-out” of samples might seem at first glance a purely geological task, but it is not. In the Atmosphere Strategic Group, one of the demanding situations was to remind the rest of the team that the atmospheric environment and the way it interacts with the surface now and beyond the effectiveness of the project and the interpretation of surface tissues in various ways. . For example, a lesson from beyond the delight of the rover at the MER Opportunity landing site is that the wind can organize the local surface fabrics in a practical way according to the composition, and potentially with essential runways on paper beyond water: at the Meridiani Planum Landing Site in Opportunity , wind-related processes had been concentrated in a combination of aqueous concretions enriched with hematite at the maximum sensitive level of the Array ridges, where their composition can also be measured with maximum efficiency. These small concretions had once spread into weaker sedimentary tissues, now long eroded, that were in the beyond saturated with water. It was those humble but resilient concretions, concentrated through the wind on the undulating ridges, that proved to be the source of the hematite signature detected from orbit that attracted the Mars Exploration Rover project to the Meridiani Planum landing site.
At Jezero crater, a prime target of the Perseverance rover will be materials carried by water that once poured into the crater, forming delta deposits that have since been partly eroded away and re-worked by the wind. What erosionally-resistant materials—perhaps originating from outside Jezero crater—might have been swept onto the crater floor area by a delta-forming river, then reworked by the wind and concentrated for convenient and efficient inspection at the crests of large ripples? Are these possibilities worth inspecting at some point along our traverse? This is one example of the many diverse ideas that the Atmosphere strategic group has been evaluating to increase the effectiveness and value of rover operations after landing.