It’s almost a month since the perseverance Mars rover successfully landed on the red planet to the cheers of scientists and spectators millions of miles away.
The rover has been kept busy since its touch in the northeastern Jezero crater, and has already taken several tests in preparation for its next missions, turning out its mechanical arm and observing its new home.
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Perseverance, or ‘Percy’, has the task of searching for traces of ancient microbial lives, and of collecting monsters and putting them in the closet for later return to Earth.
The trip is not planned until 2031 after Percy collected about 30 tubes of Mars rock and sediment.
On March 13, the robber drop his ‘belly pan’ or the protective cover that protects the sampling system.
In addition, the Rover housed a getaway for its second mission: the first Mars helicopter ever called Ingenuity – to be tested in June.
While one of the next steps for Percy and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineers is to newly named website “Octavia E. Butler Landing” to a place to test ingenuity, the rover could accomplish much.
With advanced high-definition imaging of the SuperCam and audio recording capability, brand new images and sounds have been sent back to Earth to the amazement of scientists and civilians.
The SuperCam is a rock evaporation tool mounted on the “head” of the transverse masts and which will play an active role in choosing which rocks are worthy of exploration.
At a joint news conference with the Center National D’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) of France that kept the public informed of their progress, NASA released sound of wind and the laser’s hit Máaz, one of its first rock targets, in addition to some of its first SuperCam Remote Micro-Imager (RMI) readings.
The historical recordings were released on March 10 and now each have more than 900,000 plays on the NASA SoundCloud page.
Just a few days earlier, NASA announced that Percy had made its first trip to the surface of the planet Mars.
By examining the site, scientists determined that several of the rocks they spotted were chemically similar to volcanic rocks and that wind and water eroded them.
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Geologists told the scientific journal Nature that the wind patterns appear to have blown the rocks mainly from the northwest and that darker colored rocks that could be weathered by water, in the old river delta, which once flowed through the crater and its lake, would have tumbled.
Although much of Mars’ astrobiological history is still unknown, Percy was able to take a closer look at researchers and provide important information for future missions.