Nasa Mars Rover: Key Resilience Questions

On Thursday, Nasa’s Perseverance Rover will land on Mars after a journey of nearly seven months from Earth. Here we answer some common questions about the mission.

The Perseverance Rover will land on Mars to look for signs of microbial life in the past, if it ever exists. This will be the first Nasa mission to hunt directly for these ‘biosignatures’ since the Viking missions in the 1970s.

The rover will collect samples of rock and soil, envelop them in tubes and leave them on the planet’s surface to return to earth. Perseverance will also study the geology of the Red Planet and test how astronauts on future Mars missions can produce oxygen from CO2 in the atmosphere. This oxygen can be used for breathing and fuel.

In addition, a drunken helicopter will be used to demonstrate the first powered flight on Mars. Perseverance will explore the Jezero crater of Mars for at least one Martian year (approximately 687 Earth Days).

The one-ton, car-sized rover will be launched between July 20 and August 11, 2020 from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on an Atlas 5 rocket. Perseverance travels to Mars in a protective air shell that consists of two parts: a conical back shell and a heat shield.

The aeroshell is coupled to a sailing stage that fires propellers to keep the spacecraft on course, to ensure it arrives at the right place on Mars for landing. Perseverance will descend to the Mars surface for seven minutes on 18 February 2021.

The relative positions of Earth and Mars mean that launch opportunities only appear every 26 months. If endurance would not start this summer after Mars, the mission would have to wait until September 2022 to try again.

As the spacecraft plows through the atmosphere of Mars, the heat shield temperature will have to endure up to 2100C (3,800F). If it is about 11 km (7 mi) above the ground, the spacecraft will use a parachute, delaying the heaviest load in the history of the discovery of Mars from a speed of Mach 1.7 (2,099 km / h; 1,304 mph) to about 320 km / h (200 km / h).

The heat shield then falls off the back cover and for a short time the rover – which is attached to a downhill stage – falls freely to the ground.

Eight lockers at the turn-off stage are then fired, which can perform the “sky crane” maneuver. Persistence is slowly lowered to three nylon ropes and a “umbilical cord”. When the wheel of the rover hits the ground, the cutters are cut off and the downhill road flies to a safe distance.

The rover’s target is an impact depression of 49 km (30 miles) just north of Mars’ equator. Scientists think more than 3.5 billion years ago river channels flowed over the wall of the Jezero crater to form a lake.

The large basin is also home to one of the best-preserved Mars examples of a delta, a sedimentary structure that forms when rivers end up in open bodies of water and layers of rocks, sand and – possibly – organic carbon.

Microbes could have lived in the crater when water was there. Jezero preserves a record of important geological processes such as impact cratering and volcanism, as well as the operation of water. Studying its rocks will shed light on how the planet evolved over time.

The fan-shaped delta of Jezero is one of the most important targets in the hunt for signs of past lives. Scientists also see carbonate minerals deposited like the ring in a bath around the crater’s shoreline. When carbonates precipitate from water, it can trap things in it, including evidence of life.

“We will be looking for bio-signatures – patterns, textures or substances that need the influence of life to form,” says deputy project scientist Katie Stack Morgan.

We do not know what Mars biosignatures might look like, but the ancient earth may provide clues. A record of the early life of our planet can be found in stromatolites, rocks that were originally formed by the growth of layer after layer of bacteria. If similar structures exist on Mars, scientists can combine measurements of different instruments to determine the probability of a biological origin.

Today, Mars is cold and dry, with a thin atmosphere that exposes the surface to harmful levels of cosmic radiation. But it seems to have been wetter billions of years ago with a thicker atmosphere. Several pieces of evidence, such as the mudstone and sedimentary bands, show that there was once liquid water on the surface.

This is important because water is an essential ingredient for all life on earth. Curiosity has also found that organic molecules are preserved in sedimentary rocks of three billion years. Although annoying, it is not clear whether these organic products preserve a record of ancient life, were their food or had nothing to do with biological processes.

Perseverance has an advanced load of scientific tools to gather information about Mars’ geology, atmosphere, environmental conditions and potential bio-signatures:

Ingenuity is a 1.8 kg helicopter that will travel to Mars, stuck to the belly of perseverance. Nasa wants to demonstrate a powered flight in Mars’ thin atmosphere. The red planet’s gravity is lower (about one third of the earth), but its atmosphere is only 1% of the density of the earth. This makes it more difficult to generate the required elevator to get off the ground.

The autonomous helicopter is equipped with two counter-rotating blades and can take color photos with a 13-megapixel camera, the same type commonly found in smartphones. Rotorcraft can be a useful way to explore other worlds: flying vehicles travel faster than ground base, and can reach areas inaccessible to wheeled vehicles.

Perseverance is very similar to its predecessor Curiosity in terms of overall design, but there are important differences. In addition to the new scientific payload, Perseverance has a larger “hand” or a revolver at the end of its robotic arm to hold a heavier range of tools, including a core drill.

The system designed to place samples in the closet is also a new feature. Engineers redesigned the wheels’ wheels to improve wear resistance. Curiosity’s wheels caused damage by driving over sharp, pointed rocks.

The rover’s Sample Caching System consists of three robot elements. Most visible is the 2.1 m (7 ft) long, five-joint robotic arm bolted to the chassis. A percussion drill on the tower of the arm can cut out the intact core of Marsrots. These cores – about the size of a piece of chalk – go into a sample tube. The main robot arm then places the filled tube on a mechanism in front of the rover, called the bit carousel.

This mechanism, reminiscent of a 1960s slide projector, slides the tube inside the rover where a smaller 0.5 m (1.6 ft) sample handling arm (also known as the T. rex arm) grab it. An image is taken before the tube is hermetically sealed and placed in a storage rack. It is driven around on the rover until the team finds a suitable place to unload it.

Scientists have been wanting to deliver samples of Mars rock and earth to Earth for decades to study in laboratories. Here, scientists were able to examine the samples with instruments that were too large and complicated to send to Mars. By leaving rock and soil samples in sealed tubes on the surface, permeability will lay the foundation to make it happen.

As part of the program, known as Mars Sample Return, a separate mission will be sent to land on Mars to pick up the tubes using a “fetch” robber. A robotic arm will then transfer the tubes of the haul rover to a rocket called the Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV). The take-off vehicle blows the monsters into orbit where they are trapped by an orbit. This orbit will then deliver the sample containers to Earth, possibly by 2031.