NASA has a very special delivery on Valentine’s Day on the way to the Red Planet – one that can deliver personal gifts to us in a few years.
About once every decade, the agency sends an important Mars landing mission to learn more about our potentially habitable neighbor. The latest attempt is the powerful Perseverance Rover, ready for touch on Thursday 18 February. (Bonus Valentine for you: you can watch the landing live here on Space.com, thanks to NASA TV, and participate in a virtual NASA Social event as well.)
Perseverance plays a unique role of each Mars mission before it. This Mars rover will pack gifts for delivery back to Earth – that is, samples of rocks that show promising signs of habitability on Mars. Once NASA and the European Space Agency are ready, the two agencies plan to return the precious rocky gifts of the Rover to us within about a decade, as part of a larger Mars return mission.
Related: Valentine’s Day in Space: Cosmic Love Photos
Book of Mars: $ 22.99 by Magazines Direct
Explore the mysteries of Mars within 148 pages. With the latest generation of robbers, landers and orbits on their way to the Red Planet, we discover even more of this world’s secrets than ever before. Discover the landscape and its formation, discover the truth about water on Mars and the search for life, and explore the possibility that the fourth rock of the sun may one day be our next home.
Long-range messages will flow back to us from the surface, but once the daring landing of ‘seven minutes of terror’ is complete. If all goes according to plan, Perseverance will quickly begin deploying its instruments to scan the environment with high-definition cameras, lasers, microphones and scientific equipment, and that radio that finds it back to earth. Evidence of water activity and organic molecules at the landing site in the Jezero crater could be in the inboxes of scientists within a few weeks or months.
A bonus gift from Perseverance’s mission is the Ingenuity helicopter, a small test vehicle that will show us whether flight to Mars is possible given our current understanding of its thin atmosphere. Ingenuity can show us the way for future drones to advance on landing missions, and to help robots and humans through patterns that are difficult to climb.
The landing of perseverance follows NASA’s major Curiosity rover landing in 2012 – the rover is still running while picking up further evidence of organics and molecules on Mount Sharp – and the two major Mars Exploration Rovers (Opportunity and Spirit) that guarantee their days. years after they landed on Mars in 2004.
Fortunately, smaller Mars landings are fairly frequent, and other spacecraft have jumped safely to the surface between major missions; the last successful one was the still active lander of InSight Mars in 2018. We can also not forget that Perseverance’s entry comes days after two other countries arrived safely at Mars: the Emirati Hope orbit and the Chinese lander orbiter rover trio that makes up the Tianwen-1 mission.
You can celebrate the Valentine’s Day-era special Perseverance mission safe and social distance style in various cities in the United States, which will light up their buildings red to celebrate the landing on the Red Planet, according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
- The Empire State Building in New York City plans to light the tower red the next morning (Wednesday, February 17) between sunset Tuesday, February 16 and 2:00 AM EST.
- The gates of the Los Angeles International Airport will shine red from sunset Wednesday (February 17) to sunrise Friday (February 19). JPL, where the rover operations are centered, is located in nearby Pasadena.
- Downtown Chicago residents should see the Adler Planetarium lit up with other buildings in downtown. (No exact timing was available in JPL’s release.)
NASA added that cities across the country and the world should feel free to light their own city red if they want to.
You can find out here how you can virtually join the Perseverance Mars roverland by signing up for NASA’s social media event. NASA also has a “virtual gas experience” available to which the public can also participate.
Visit Space.com Thursday for full coverage of the landing of the Perseverance Mars rover on the Red Planet.
Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.