The touch of NASA’s next Mars rover is less than a month away.
The average car the size of the car, the core of NASA’s $ 2.7 billion March 2020 broadcast, will end on February 18 and usher in a new era of exploring the Red Planet.
On that fateful day, a rocket-propelled aerial crane will lower its endurance to the floor of the 28-kilometer-wide (45-kilometer) floor. Jezero Crater, which offered a lake and a river delta billions of years ago. In the course of its mission, Perseverance Jezero will search for signs of ancient Mars life and collect dozens of monsters and put them in the closet.
Pictured: NASA’s Mars Perseverance Rover mission to the Red Planet
If all goes according to plan, these monsters will be transported to Earth as early as 2031 by a joint NASA European Space Agency campaign, in humanity’s very first Mars return attempt.
March 2020 is also historic in other ways. NASA did not actively hunt for signs of Mars life since the Twin Viking missions, launched in the mid-1970s. (Perseverance’s predecessor, the still productive Curiosityassesses the habitability of Mars in the past, but is not equipped to seek life for itself.) And to travel to the Red Planet with the perseverance is small helicopter named Ingenuity, which will try to become the first rotorcraft ever to fly on a world beyond the earth.
Perseverance is also designed to pave the way for the exploration of Mars by humans. For example, one of the Rover’s instruments, called MOXIE (short for “Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment”), will generate oxygen from the carbon dioxide-dominated Martian atmosphere – technology that, when enlarged, can help our species gain a foothold on the Red Planet, NASA officials said. (ISRU, in turn, stands for ” in situ resource utilization ”, a wonderful term for living off the land.)
So there is a lot to look forward to after Perseverance gets the red dirt. And the NASA rover is not the only spacecraft that will arrive on Mars next month. The United Arab Emirates’ first Red Planet mission, an orbit named Hope, will reach Mars on February 9, if all goes according to plan. The milestone will be reached a day later by the arrival of Tianwen-1, China’s first fully homemade Red Planet effort.
Tianwen-1 consists of an orbit and a lander-rover pair. Chinese space officials said the runway would spend several months at the designated landing site to prepare for the touchdown, which is expected to take place in May.
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.