The long voyage of NASA’s next Mars rover is almost over.
The size of the car Perseverance, launched on July 30 last year, will land inside the 28-kilometer (45-kilometer) Jezero Crater on February 18.
“I am delighted to be here today as our countdown to Mars decreases from months to just a few weeks,” Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Division of Planetary Science, told a news conference on Wednesday (January 27). ‘Perseverance is starting on the Red Planet, and our team is preparing for it Jezero Crater. “
Pictured: NASA’s Mars Perseverance Rover mission to the Red Planet
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Perseverance is at the heart of NASA’s $ 2.7 billion Mars 2020 mission, which will break new ground in the exploration of the Red Planet. The rover will, for example, hunt for evidence of ancient Mars life on the floor of Jezero, which billions of years ago offered a lake and a river delta. No previous Red Planet robot has done such work (although NASA’s twin spacecraft from Viking, which struck in 1976, did search for signs of existing organisms).
It will probably be difficult for perseverance to definitively trace ancient life, if it does exist, members of the mission team said. But another groundbreaking aspect of the Rover’s mission could enable this desired breakthrough, if the on-site observations alone are not sufficient.
Perseverance will begin humanity’s first attempt to return from Mars ever. The robot will collect several dozen samples and put them in the closet, which is being done by a NASA European Space Agency campaign move to earth as early as 2031.
The pristine Mars material will be studied by scientists here for decades to come, just as scientists still do today on the Apollo moon rock por, 50 years after it was collected, according to Glaze. And astrobiological investigations will undoubtedly be a high priority for the teams that get their hands on the rock and dirt collected by Perseverance.
“Samples of Mars can drastically change our understanding of the origin, evolution, and distribution of life on Earth and elsewhere in the solar system,” Glaze said.
March 2020 is also designed to pave the way for courageous future reconnaissance efforts. For example, a small helicopter named Ingenuity travel to the Red Planet on the belly of perseverance. Shortly after contact, Ingenuity will depart and undertake some short test flights, the first ever by a rotorcraft in a world beyond the earth. If Ingenuity performs well, helicopters could seriously start capturing the air of Mars in the near future, which could serve as scouts for robbers and / or collect data themselves, NASA officials said.
Persistence also carries an instrument called MOXIE (short for “Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment”), which will generate oxygen from the thin atmosphere dominated by Mars with carbon dioxide. Once technology, once augmented, can help humanity set up shop on the Red Planet, mission team members said.
Perseverance, of course, can do none of this work unless it arrives safely on February 18th. The stray beam will come down with the same dramatic “air crane” strategy that its predecessor, the Curiosity, in August 2012. And March 2020 will find some progress in terms of curiosity in this regard – specifically the technological “trigger” and “terrain relative navigation”, which let perseverance land more precisely than what Curiosity did.
But at 2,260 pounds. (1,025 kilograms), perseverance is a little heavier than Curiosity – actually heavier than any payload that has ever landed on Mars. And Jezero is full of dangers such as cliffs and rocks.
“I do not think I am exaggerating when I say that entry, descent and landing are the most critical and dangerous part of a mission,” Allen Chen, entry, descent and landing leader on March 2020, told NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said during Wednesday’s news conference.
“Success is never guaranteed,” Chen said. “And this is especially true when we are trying to land the biggest, heaviest and most complicated rover we have ever built on the most dangerous terrain in which we have ever tried to land.”
So think of happy thoughts for perseverance on February 18th. Or start thinking about it now; it can not hurt, and the big day is only three weeks away.
Mike Wall is the author of “Out there“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.