Category Archives: Mars

This may be the next iconic space photo.

NASA just released an image showing its Perseverance Mars rover dangling about 6.5 feet (2 meters) above the red dirt during its picture-perfect touchdown inside Jezero Crater yesterday (Feb. 18). The stunning photo was taken by a camera on Perseverance's "sky crane" descent stage, which had nearly finished lowering the SUV-sized robot to the surface on cables at the time.

The image breaks new ground, documenting a Mars landing with detail and immediacy never seen before. It therefore deserves mention with the famous space photos that have moved us all over the years, such as the classic picture of Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin on the moon in July 1969 and the Hubble Space Telescope's famous "Pillars of Creation" shot, said Adam Steltzner, the chief engineer for Perseverance's mission, which is known as Mars 2020.

Related: What's next for Perseverance after Mars landing success?Live updates: Follow the Perseverance Mars rover mission

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"It is absolutely exhilarating, and it is evocative of those other images from our experience as human beings, moving out into our solar system those images that bring us into the process of our exploration," Steltzner said during a news conference today (Feb. 19) at which the new image was unveiled. "And I'm so happy that we can contribute another to that collection."

The epic pre-landing photo is just a taste of what's to come. It's part of a high-definition video captured by multiple cameras during Perseverance's entry, descent and landing (EDL), which the Mars 2020 team hopes to have ready to show us by Monday (Feb. 22).

That video could include sound, for the rover sports an EDL microphone. The team does not yet know whether that mic worked yesterday, Steltzner said; that question should be answered over the weekend as Perseverance beams more data home to Earth.

Related: NASA's Mars 2020 rover mission in pictures

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The rover's landing sequence was also captured from afar, NASA officials announced today. The agency's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been circling the Red Planet since 2006, snapped a shot of Mars 2020 cruising through the alien skies beneath its supersonic parachute.

"We're still figuring out the exact timing of when this image was taken as well," Aaron Stehura, the Mars 2020 EDL deputy phase lead, said during today's news conference.

"So, it's even possible that we had already come out of the protective entry capsule and we're coming down on rockets to the surface," Stehura said. He, like Steltzner, is based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, which manages the Mars 2020 mission.

The $2.7 billion Mars 2020 is ambitious and diverse. It has two main goals: hunt for signs of ancient life on the floor of the 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) Jezero, which hosted a lake and a river delta billions of years ago; and collect several dozen especially promising samples for future return to Earth.

But Perseverance is not quite ready to dig into this science work in earnest. The team must first perform the standard post-landing assessments, health checks and deployments, which will take a few days. Those checkouts are already underway, and the early returns are good.

"I'm happy to say that the rover is doing great and is healthy on the surface of Mars," Pauline Hwang of JPL, the Mars 2020 strategic mission manager, said during today's briefing. Perseverance "continues to be highly, highly functional and awesome, and I'm exhilarated," she added.

The six-wheeled robot also still needs to switch over to surface-optimized software, a crucial task that will begin soon and require about four days to complete.

When Perseverance is ready to roll, its first destination will be a helipad a good spot for the mission's helicopter, named Ingenuity, to make a handful of pioneering flights. Ingenuity traveled to Mars on Perseverance's belly and remains attached today; it will drop to the ground at the helipad, which the Mars 2020 team has not yet identified, then take to the skies after Perseverance has rolled a safe distance away.

Ingenuity doesn't have any science instruments it's a technology demonstration but the little craft can take color photos and video, so it may give us an amazing, bird's eye view of Jezero. And Perseverance will attempt to document the 4-lb. (1.8 kilograms) chopper's flights, both with its cameras and its two microphones. (The other mic is part of the rover's rock-zapping SuperCam instrument.)

It's unclear how long all of this will take. But during a post-landing news conference yesterday, Mars 2020 deputy project manager Jennifer Trosper, also of JPL, gave an estimate: helicopter prep and flights occurring in the spring, and sampling and science work really ramping up this summer.

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.

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Wow! See the Perseverance rover dangling above Mars in this amazing landing photo - Space.com

Just minutes after NASA's Perseverance Mars rover nailed its touchdown on the Red Planet, the spacecraft sent back the first two images of its new home in Jezero Crater.

After a seven-month trek to Mars, the Perseverance rover completed the perilous landing procedure nicknamed "seven minutes of terror" on Thursday (Feb. 18), with the successful landing announced just before 4 p.m. EST (2100 GMT, or 1 p.m. PST at the mission's headquarters at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Just minutes after the good news arrived, NASA received the rover's first two images.

Live updates: NASA's Perseverance Mars rover landingWatch more: Space.com's Perseverance playlist

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Within 148 pages, explore the mysteries of Mars. With the latest generation of rovers, landers and orbiters heading to the Red Planet, we're discovering even more of this world's secrets than ever before. Find out about its landscape and formation, discover the truth about water on Mars and the search for life, and explore the possibility that the fourth rock from the sun may one day be our next home.View Deal

These photographs were taken by hazard cameras attached to the spacecraft and are black and white images; they were also taken with covers still attached to the camera lenses for their protection. Later images from the rover will be much more impressive.

The first image also shows the comforting shadow of the rover itself cast on the Martian surface. The new photographs will also help mission personnel identify precisely where in the landing zone Perseverance touched down.

But these images are just what scientists on the mission wanted to see, showing off the rocky surface of Mars' Jezero Crater. Mission scientists chose the location because they believe that when the Red Planet was still covered in water, the crater was once a lake, with a river delta depositing sediments on its floor.

Studying these rocks, the scientists hope, will allow them to better understand the planet's past habitability and inform the search for traces of life on Mars.

Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her on Twitter @meghanbartels. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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The view from Mars: Here's the 1st photo from NASA's Perseverance rover! - Space.com

When the Perseverance rover sets down on Mars on Thursday, another NASA spacecraft already there will be listening for the thump-thump that will result when the newcomer arrives.

The hope is that these thumps will create enough shaking to be detected by InSight, a stationary NASA probe that arrived in 2018 to listen for marsquakes with an exquisitely sensitive seismometer. The InSight lander sits more than 2,000 miles to the east of where Perseverance is to land.

We have a reasonable chance of seeing it, said Benjamin Fernando, a graduate student at the University of Oxford in England and a member of the InSight science team.

Unless something goes catastrophically wrong, the seismic signals that InSight might hear will not emanate from the rover itself. Perseverance is to be lowered to the surface from a hovering crane, bumping to the ground gently at slower than 2 miles per hour.

Rather, scientists will be sifting through InSights seismic data for signs of the impacts of two 170-pound blocks of tungsten metal that helped keep Perseverance in a stable, balanced spin during its 300-million-mile trip from Earth. At an altitude of 900 miles above Mars, they will be jettisoned as junk, and without parachutes or retrorockets to slow them down, they will then slam into the surface at some 9,000 m.p.h.

This enormous speed means that theyll make quite a substantial crater, Mr. Fernando said. In 2012, similar tungsten blocks from the Curiosity rover, which is almost the same design as Perseverance, left scars visible from orbit.

Coming in at a shallow 10-degree angle, the blocks impact will be to the east, which should create a splash of seismic energy heading toward InSight that would increase the chances of detecting the vibrations.

If the impact waves are detected, this will not just be a feat of technical skill. The data could help illuminate the structure of the crust of Mars.

The main purpose of the seismometer on InSight is to record marsquakes, and the spacecraft has so far recorded more than 400 such tremors. Scientists also expected that InSight would detect shaking caused by space rocks occasionally crashing into Mars.

But so far, the number of recorded meteor impacts is zero. Or at least there are no wiggles that the scientists could confidently conclude were generated by such collisions. The lack of obvious signals suggests the crust of Mars may be more similar to that of Earths moon than to Earths.

Seismic waves travel farther through solid rock than a pile of loose material like sand. On Earth, the constant churning of plate tectonics generates new solid rocks at the surface. On the moon, there are no longer eruptions of lava, and over billions of years, the bombardment of meteors has broken up the ancient lunar crust into tiny bits. The result is a loose top layer, which explains why the astronauts left so many boot prints during their visits.

Mars is probably somewhere in between the moon and the Earth, Mr. Fernando said.

With Perseverance, however, the exact time and location of the landing will be known, and thus InSight scientists will know where to look in the seismic data and pull out a minuscule signal that would normally be overlooked.

This is similar to how scientists decades ago were able to calibrate the seismometers left on the moon by NASAs Apollo astronauts when pieces of rockets and lunar landers crashed into the moon.

With that knowledge, they could then sift through earlier data and look for similar patterns that could be meteor impacts.

Mr. Fernando and the other InSight scientists also considered other signals that the seismometer might pick up. Perhaps waves of air pressure from the sonic boom of the arriving Perseverance would be enough. Or the sonic boom would shake the ground, generating a wave that would travel to InSight.

But their calculations showed that those rumblings would be too small to be detectable.

They also considered looking out for larger pieces of the spacecraft like the heat shield that will also hit the ground. But those will be jettisoned at lower altitudes and not travel as fast, generating small seismic waves.

Weather could pose another complication. If the winds on Mars are too strong on Thursday, they could buffet InSights seismometer, creating noise that could also obscure the signal from Perseverances arrival.

What lies below the surface of Mars remains in large part a mystery. Indeed, the planets innards thwarted the other main objective of InSight, to deploy a heat probe, nicknamed the mole, that would hammer itself about 16 feet into the Martian soil. But the probe kept bouncing back up.

The sand around the mole exhibited an unexpected property of clumping, and that prevented sufficient friction for the device to propel itself more than 14 inches below the surface.

In January, NASA announced it was giving up on the mole. Nonetheless, the InSight mission was extended until December 2022, with the aim of gathering more seismic data.

Now InSight will have to survive the Martian winter. Its solar panels, shrouded with dust, are now generating only 27 percent as much power as they used to when they were new and clean. None of the hundreds of dust devils essentially tiny tornado whirlwinds in the neighborhood have come close enough to blow away the dust. So the missions managers are figuring out how to operate the spacecraft with less energy, including by switching off some science instruments. That should be enough to keep it from freezing to death, which was the fate of NASAs Opportunity rover in 2018 after being enveloped in a planet-wide dust storm.

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NASA Will Listen for Thumps on Mars From Perseverance Rover's Arrival - The New York Times

NASAs Perseverance rover pictured moments before landing on Mars. In this view from a downward-facing camera on the descent stage, the rover is suspended by Nylon cords. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The first picture of NASAs Perseverance rover landing on Mars shows the nuclear-powered robot suspended under its rocket jetpack just before touchdown. The spectacular view could be upstaged next week with the release of a first-of-its-kind high-definition video replay of the rovers final descent.

The spacecraft carried six ruggedized commercial off-the-shelf cameras to capture video during descent toward Jezero Crater, home to an ancient lakebed that scientists hope harbors clues about the possibility that Mars had life billions of years ago.

Three of the cameras were located on top of the crafts backshell to record video of the supersonic parachute, which helped slow down the rover after entering the Martian atmosphere. After releasing the backshell, the missions descent stage fired eight throttleable braking rockets before lowering the one-ton rover to the surface of Mars in a maneuver known as the sky crane.

There were two cameras on the rover itself, one looking down and another looking up at the rocket pack. And another camera on the descent stage captured imagery of the rover suspended under nylon cords during touchdown Thursday.

NASA released a still image from that camera Friday, offering a never-before-seen view of a spacecraft landing on another planet.

When I think on our human space exploration, I am brought to remember the images that bring us humans into that process, said Adam Steltzner, the Mars 2020 missions chief engineer at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

Steltzner, a veteran JPL engineer, compared the birds-eye view of the Perseverance rover to other iconic photos in space exploration, such as astronauts on the moon, the first up-close view of Saturn and its rings, and famous images from the Hubble Space Telescope.

We can only hope in our efforts to engineer spacecraft and explore our solar system that we might be able to someday contribute yet another iconic image to this collection, Steltzner said. Im happy to say that Im hopeful we can with this.

The picture shows Perseverance around 7 feet, or 2 meters, above the surface of Mars, Steltzner said.

You can see the mechanical bridles that hold the rover underneath the descent stage, (the)three straight lines heading down to the top deck, Steltzner said. And then the curly electrical umbilical that is taking all of the electrical signals from the descent stage down to the computer inside the belly of the rover.

The nylon bridles unspooled to a length of about 25 feet, or 7.6 meters, as the descent stages retrorockets slowed the vehicle to gently place the rover on the surface. Once the rover detected touchdown, pyrotechnically fired blades engaged to sever the connection with the descent stage, which flew a safe distance away before intentionally crashing into the planet.

Steltzner said the picture released Friday helps bring people on the adventure of space exploration.

The plumes (from the rocket exhaust) are hitting the surface of Mars, kicking up little wisps of dust, he said. It is absolutely exhilarating, and it is evocative of those other images from our experience as human beings moving out into our solar system, those images that bring us into our process of exploration, and Im so happy that we can contribute another to that collection.

Since landing Thursday, the Perseverance rover has fired pyrotechnic restraints to release camera lens covers, the crafts high-gain communications antenna, and robotic arm, according to Pauline Hwang, the rovers assistant strategic mission manager.

More checkouts of the rover and its instruments are planned this weekend, including deployment of Perseverances remote sensing mast, which has a panoramic camera and a Mars weather station. That will allow the rover to begin taking images for a 360-degree panorama in the next few days.

Additional communications sessions with the rover this weekend will be used to transmit more imagery from Thursdays landing. Mission managers said they hope to have video from the landing available in time to release it during a press conference Monday.

Were all chomping at the bit, saidAaron Stehura, deputy lead for the rovers entry, descent, and landing phase. Seeing the rover hangingunderneath the sky crane, underneath our rocket-powered jet pack, this is something that weve never seen before. It was stunning, and the team was awestruck, and there was just a feeling of victory that we were able to capture this and share it with the world.

A microphone on the port side of the rover was expected to record audio during Perseverances landing Thursday. Steltzner said the ground team hopes to confirm this weekend if the microphone worked, and if so, the recording could be downlinked later this weekend or next week. If it worked, the recording may contain audio of the sounds of pyrotechnic devices firing to release the parachute and the sound of the descent stage engines, according to NASA.

NASAs Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter snapped a picture of Perseverance as it flew under parachute toward the landing zone in Jezero Crater. MROs sharp-eyed mapping camera, known as HiRISE, spotted the rover from a distance of 435 miles, or 700 kilometers, NASA said.

Perseverance also downlinked more pictures from its hazard avoidance cameras overnight, revealing Jezero Crater in color for the first time. An escarpment is visible on the horizon, along with scattered rocks and boulders in the distance.

But the rover ended up at a location with a tilt of just 1 degree, with no obstacles that prevented a safe landing. Perseverance was the first Mars lander to use terrain relative navigation, algorithms that used images taken during descent and compared them pre-loaded orbital imagery, allowing the rover to steer to a safe location within the missions broader landing zone.

Steltzner said Perseverances landing went as smoothly as we could have wanted it to go. The navigation algorithms took the rover toan almost pool table flat landing site with rocks small compared the size of the rovers wheels.

That is exactly what we were hoping for, Steltzner said Friday. So the day went very, very well. We will, as we always do, comb through the detail and look for anomalies that might teach us how to do our jobs better in the future, nut we didnt see any huge ones that stuck out yesterday.

With more pictures coming down from the rover every day, Stehura said its possible Perseverance may have taken photos of the descent stage rocket pack impacting the ground somewhere near the landing site.

Beginning as soon as Monday, ground teams at JPL will send up commands for Perseverance start transitioning to new software governing the rovers mission on the surface of Mars. Up to now, the rover has operated on software designed for the cruise from Earth to Mars, and the entry, descent, and landing, Hwang said.

The process will take about four sols a sol is a Martian day, lasting nearly 24 hours, 40 minutes and will occur very slowly and deliberately, Hwang said. We have two computers on the rover, our prime and our backup computer, so we actually do a checkout of the flight computers before we do full upgrade.

The software code is already stored on the rovers computers. The transition involves telling the computers first the prime and then the backup to toe dip into the new software then to switch back to the existing code. Engineers on Earth will evaluate how the computers performed during the changeover, then give the final go to fully transition to the surface operations software.

With the new software, Perseverance will be ready to perform checkouts of its robotic arm. The first test drive is expected around Perseverances ninth full day on Mars, or around Feb. 27.

If all goes as planned, the rover will complete its post-landing tests and activations next month, clearing the way for Perseverance to drive to a nearby location to deploy the Ingenuity helicopter, a 4-pound (1.8-kilogram) rotorcraft that will attempt to become the first such device to fly through the atmosphere of another planet.

Hwang said the first flight of the helicopter might occur around 60 sols after landing, or some time in mid-to-late April. The test flight might happen earlier if the checkouts with the rover go quicker than expected.

The first pictures from the surface of Jezero Crater also have scientists eager to begin their exploration of a new site on the Red Planet. The 28-mile-wide (45-kilometer) crater was created about 3.8-to-3.9 billion years ago by the impact of an asteroid or comet.

The crater was home to a body of liquid water more than 3 billion years ago, with evidence that river once flowed into the lake, depositing sediments in a delta. The rocks Perseverance will study inside the crater are likely between 3.6-to-3.8 billion years old, said Katie Stack Morgan, the missions deputy project scientist.

This is a time in Mars history when water was stable on the surface of Mars, and we think this area would have been a habitable environment, Morgan said.

One rock visible next to one of Perseverances six wheels has already caught the attention of scientists. The rock has holes, which might have been left behind as it solidified from lava, assuming the rock had a volcanic origin. If the rock was created by sedimentary deposits in the ancient lake at Jezero Crater, the holes might have carved from water that flowed through the material, according to Morgan.

We have to get our instruments out and look at these textures in fine detail and help us make that determination, Morgan said.

Scientists want Perseverance to gather both volcanic and sedimentary rock samples for return to Earth by a future mission. Once the specimens are back on Earth, perhaps as soon as 2031, scientists will be able to precisely date the volcanic rocks to anchor assumptions about the evolution of Mars, Morgan said. Sedimentary rocks returned to Earth will tell scientists about the environment of the lake that once filled Jezero Crater, and might contain evidence that the Red Planet had life.

After releasing the Ingenuity helicopter for its test flight campaign, Perseverance will begin visiting scientific targets and could collect its first rock sample this summer. The rover will likely head toward the dried-up river delta, which Morgan said is located a little more than a mile (2 kilometers) from Perseverances landing site.

We cant wait to get this science mission started, Morgan said.

Email the author.

Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.

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First images of Mars rover landing just a taste of what's to come Spaceflight Now - Spaceflight Now

Elated NASA scientists Friday pored through the first landing scenes transmitted by the space agencys Perseverance rover on Mars.

In the most dramatic image, a camera aboard the Perseverance landing system captured a close-up of the one-ton six-wheeled mobile robot suspended just a few yards above the surface of the red planet, where it successfully touched down Thursday, after a 292-million-mile journey from Earth.

Hanging from the cables used to lower it from the lander to the ground, the rover resembled a high-tech marionette dangling on strings.

You can see the dust kicked up by the rovers engines, said Adam Steltzner, Perseverance chief engineer at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. It was stunning and the team was awestruck. And, you know, there is just a feeling of victory that we were able to take these.

As it prospects for past life on Mars over the next two years, NASAs $2.7 billion rover will be transmitting a vast portfolio of high-resolution images, panoramic views and 3-D color stereo landscapes back to mission engineers and scientists.

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Mars Photos: See NASAs Perseverance Rovers First Visions of Red Planet - The Wall Street Journal

A rover and a tiny helicopter are preparing to land on Mars, aiming to offer an opportunity to answer an enduring question: has life ever emerged on another planet?

Nasas ninth mission to descend on the cold, dry, red planet will be steered by a $2.7bn (2.1bn), car-sized, six-wheeled rover christened Perseverance, which is expected to touch down on Thursday following a seven-month journey.

Previous Mars missions including Curiosity and Opportunity have suggested Mars was once a wet planet with an environment likely to have been potentially supportive of life billions of years ago. Astrobiologists hope this latest mission can offer some evidence to prove whether that was the case.

Perseverance is carrying a clutch of instruments designed to analyse rocks for biosignatures chemical hallmarks of life and will also store other samples from the planets surface. Future missions fuelled by Europe and the US will retrieve these samples and return them to Earth.

The emergence of life on Earth is an extraordinary event that is not fully understood, and ancient Mars had a much more benign climate than it has now, with many of the same raw materials that were available on Earth, noted Colin Wilson, a physicist at Oxford University.

Of all the steps needed to develop life, how many occurred on Mars? This [mission] tells us not only about whether were alone in the solar system but also about how likely we are to find life in the thousands of other planets being discovered around other suns so [it] has truly cosmic implications, he said.

Apart from new instruments and an upgraded autopilot system, engineers have given Perseverance the ability to deploy a diminutive helicopter. Called Ingenuity, the 1.8kg drone-like rotorcraft is the first flying machine ever sent to another planet, and could serve as a pathfinder to discover inaccessible areas or as a scout for future rovers.

Mission controllers are steering the rover which weighs more than a tonne towards the 28 mile-wide (45km) Jezero crater north of the planets equator. The site was chosen for its promise for preserving signs of life: it was once home to an ancient lake and river delta that may have collected and buried microbes and locked them within rocks.

But with its low gravity and rarefied atmosphere, Mars is hardly a hospitable destination. More than half of the spacecraft sent there have blown up or crashed owing to hardware or software mishaps. Nasas new generation of rovers, including Perseverance, rely on a rocket platform called a sky crane to lower it on to Marss surface.

Perseverance is barrelling towards Mars at around 12,400 miles per hour; when it hits the top of the atmosphere, a heatshield slows it down to about a tenth of this speed. Then a supersonic parachute will pop out of the rover and reduce its speed to a few hundred miles per hour.

At that point, descending under the parachute, Perseverance will still be travelling far too fast to land safely. So it will then have to cut itself loose from the parachute and use rocket thrusters to slow down further. The thrusters will be used to hover roughly 20 metres above the surface, and the rover is then lowered by cables to the surface using the sky crane. The crane itself will then fire its rockets to crash at a safe distance.

Things can go wrong at multiple junctures. After covering hundreds of millions of miles, the rover needs to perform all landing autonomously. No corrections are possible because the long distance means any signal travels for several minutes, noted Susanne Schwenzer, an astrobiologist at the Open University.

Wind could divert the landing craft, especially in the parachute phase. The Martian surface itself, which can be strewn with boulders and contain sand patches and dunes as well as slopes and canyons,could be another obstacle in finding a safe landing spot, she said.

But, if all goes as planned, radio signals confirming success will be sent, followed shortly afterwards by the first images from the rover. Perseverance is scheduled to stick around for at least one Mars year two Earth years.

I am happily nervous in anticipation of the words we are safe on Mars, said Schwenzer. Having watched the Curiosity landing live, and knowing it can work, makes me optimistic, but of course, landing on another planet is never easy, never routine.

Apart from Nasa, missions from the UAE and China to Mars also kicked off last year. In 2023 the European Space Agency is expected to land on Mars its Rosalind Franklin rover, which will carry a drill capable of reaching metres below the surface, where biomolecules may survive protected from the harsh conditions above.

Schwenzer said that if indications of life were discovered on Mars and there was a huge responsibility on scientists to be sure it would be the most exciting finding since the insight that the Earth is not flat.

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Nasa Perseverance rover to land on Mars in search of life - The Guardian

Nasas science rover Perseverance, the most advanced astrobiology laboratory ever sent to another world, streaked through the Martian atmosphere on Thursday and landed safely on the floor of a vast crater, its first stop on a search for traces of ancient microbial life on the Red Planet.

Mission managers at Nasas jet propulsion laboratory near Los Angeles burst into applause and cheers as radio signals confirmed that the six-wheeled rover had survived its perilous descent and arrived within its target zone inside Jezero crater, site of a long-vanished Martian lake bed.

The robotic vehicle sailed through space for nearly seven months, covering 293m miles (472m km) before piercing the Martian atmosphere at 12,000mph (19,000km/h) to begin its approach to touchdown on the planets surface.

The spacecrafts self-guided descent and landing during a complex series of maoeuvres that Nasa dubbed the seven minutes of terror stands as the most elaborate and challenging feat in the annals of robotic spaceflight.

Touchdown confirmed! Perseverance safely on the surface of Mars, ready to begin seeking signs of past life, the flight controller, Swati Mohan, announced at mission control to back-slapping, fist-bumping colleagues wearing masks against the coronavirus.

A second round of cheers and applause erupted in the control room as the images of the surface arrived minutes after touchdown. Partially obscured by a dust cover, the first picture was a view from one of the Perseverances hazard cameras. It showed the flat, rocky surface of the Jezero crater.

A second image taken by a camera on board the spacecraft showed a view from behind the rover of the Jezero crater. The rover appeared to have touched down about 32 metres (35 yards) from the nearest rocks.

It really is the beginning of a new era, Nasas associate administrator for science, Thomas Zurbuchen, said earlier in the day during Nasas webcast of the event.

Perseverance approached Mars at about 12,400mph, although when it hit the top of the atmosphere, a heatshield slowed it down to about a tenth of this speed. Then a supersonic parachute popped out of the rover to reduce its speed to a few hundred miles per hour.

At that point, descending under the parachute, Perseverance was still travelling far too fast to land safely. So it cut itself loose from the parachute and used rocket thrusters to slow down further. The thrusters allowed it to hover roughly 20 metres above the surface, before the rover was lowered by cables to the surface using a rocket platform called a sky crane.

At post-landing briefing, Nasas acting chief, Steve Jurczyk, called it an amazing accomplishment, adding, I cannot tell you how overcome with emotion I was.

The descent and landing systems had performed flawlessly, said Matt Wallace, the deputy project manager for the rover, adding: The good news is the spacecraft, I think, is in great shape, said Matt Wallace, the missions deputy project manager.

The landing represented the riskiest part of two-year, $2.7bn endeavor whose primary aim is to search for possible fossilized signs of microbes that may have flourished on Mars about 3bn years ago, when the fourth planet from the sun was warmer, wetter and potentially hospitable to life.

Scientists hope to find biosignatures embedded in samples of ancient sediments that Perseverance is designed to extract from Martian rock for future analysis back on Earth the first such specimens ever collected by humankind from another planet.

Two subsequent Mars missions are planned to retrieve the samples and return them to Nasa in the next decade.

Nasa scientists have described Perseverance as the most ambitious of nearly 20 US missions to Mars dating back to the Mariner spacecrafts 1965 fly-by.

Joe Biden tweeted congratulations over the landing, saying: Today proved once again that with the power of science and American ingenuity, nothing is beyond the realm of possibility, the president said.

Perseverance is carrying a clutch of instruments designed to analyse rocks for biosignatures chemical hallmarks of life and will also store other samples from the planets surface. Future missions fuelled by Europe and the US will retrieve these samples and return them to Earth.

The emergence of life on Earth is an extraordinary event that is not fully understood, and ancient Mars had a much more benign climate than it has now, with many of the same raw materials that were available on Earth, said Colin Wilson, a physicist at Oxford University.

Of all the steps needed to develop life, how many occurred on Mars? This [mission] tells us not only about whether were alone in the solar system but also about how likely we are to find life in the thousands of other planets being discovered around other suns so [it] has truly cosmic implications, he said.

Apart from new instruments and an upgraded autopilot system, engineers have given Perseverance the ability to deploy a diminutive helicopter. Called Ingenuity, the 1.8kg drone-like rotorcraft is the first flying machine ever sent to another planet, and could serve as a pathfinder to discover inaccessible areas or as a scout for future rovers.

The landing site was chosen for its promise for preserving signs of life: it was once home to an ancient lake and river delta that may have collected and buried microbes and locked them within rocks.

Apart from Nasa, missions from the UAE and China to Mars also kicked off last year. In 2023 the European Space Agency is expected to land on Mars its Rosalind Franklin rover, which will carry a drill capable of reaching metres below the surface, where biomolecules may survive protected from the harsh conditions above.

Schwenzer said that if indications of life were discovered on Mars and there was a huge responsibility on scientists to be sure it would be the most exciting finding since the insight that the Earth is not flat.

Reuters contributed reporting

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Mars rover landing: Nasa's Perseverance touches down safely in search of life - The Guardian

Editors Note: NASA's Perseverance rover successfully landed on Mars on February 18 just before 4 p.m. eastern time. Read more about the mission here.

After a seven-month, nearly 300-million-mile journey to Mars, NASAs Perseverance rover is poised to undertake one of the most challenging engineering feats in human history: touchdown on the red planet.

At 3:55 p.m. eastern time today, the 2,260-pound roverthe heaviest object ever sent to the surface of another planetshould set its wheels in the ruddy dirt of Jezero Crater to begin its search for signs of past life. But to get to the ground, the rover must endure what NASA calls the seven minutes of terror. The spacecraft carrying the rover has been hurtling from Earth to Mars and will slam into the atmosphere at high speed. So in the span of about seven minutes, the spacecraft must slow its descent and settle gently on the surface.

Landing on Mars is really all about finding a way to stop, says Allen Chen, the lead engineer for Perseverances entry, descent, and landing (EDL) system. Perseverance will hit the atmosphere going over 12,000 miles per hour, but it needs to touch down at about two miles per hour.

To land, Perseverance will use a sky crane, a system devised by NASA and used in 2012 to successfully deposit the Curiosity rover in Marss Gale Crater. And, for the first time, video cameras and microphones will capture the full descent of a spacecraft as it lands on Mars. We really want to take people along for the ride this time and see what its like to land on another planet, Chen says.

You can watch live coverage of the landing on NASA TV starting at 2:15 p.m. eastern time, as the mission control team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California track the spacecrafts descent. But the video and audio of Perseverances landing will take more time to transmit to Earth. Due to the current distance between the two planets, sending even a basic radio signal to Earth will take about 11 and a half minutes. And before it can transmit audio or video, the rover must first indicate that it is safe. It will then have several other tasks to perform during its first days on Mars, such as starting up its surface operations software and deploying a mast with its primary science cameras.

If everything goes according to plan, the rover will send back an image tomorrow that will show the view looking down on Perseverance from above. By Monday, the team hopes to release video from the same view. The data for high-quality footage will take longer to transmit and process, so NASA should release high-resolution footage of the entire landing sequence in the coming weeks.

But first, the spacecraft has to make it safely to the surface.

Tucked behind a heat shield, the rover will begin to slow when it hits the atmosphere, like a meteor going across the sky, Chen says. Thrusters will direct the spacecraft toward its landing site as its body produces lift, kind of like an airplane in some ways.

Once it slows to about twice the speed of sound, Perseverance will deploy a 70-foot-wide parachute. You fire this parachute pack out of the back of the vehicle with basically a cannon, Chen says. A new technology called the range trigger will fire the parachute according to how close the spacecraft is to the landing site, allowing Perseverance to target a smaller landing zone than Curiosity, which deployed its parachute once it hit a certain velocity. The spacecraft will then jettison its heat shield and get its first look at the ground using radar and another new system called terrain-relative navigation.

Terrain-relative navigation gives the system eyes, almost literally, Chen says. By snapping photos of the surface and comparing them to onboard maps, which were created from photos taken by spacecraft orbiting Mars, Perseverance can land with enough precision to touch down in an area scattered with boulders and sloped inclines.

The Jezero landing site that were going to was actually rejected as a landing site for Curiosity because it was too unsafe, Chen says. But with terrain-relative navigation and the range trigger system, Perseverance can go where no Mars rover could go before.

Even after the chute has slowed the rover, it will still be hurtling toward the ground at about 160 miles an hour. Thats about as fast as a skydiver would be going, diving straight at the ground without a parachute, here on Earth, Chen says. In the wispy Martian atmosphere, where the air is less than one percent as thick as Earths, a parachute cannot slow the craft any further.

About 1.3 miles above the surface, the spacecraft will release from the parachute and then fire up rocket engines on its descent stage, slowing to about 1.7 miles an hour. At 70 feet above the ground, the descent stage will perform the sky crane maneuver: the landing system will lower the rover to the surface on tethers, then cut the cords and fly off to crash away from the rover.

Perseverance will lower itself from that rocket-powered jetpack thats called the descent stage, deploy its wheelsthats our landing gearand touch down, you know, slower than I can walk, Chen says.

As part of the mission, NASA is planning to capture a Mars landing like never before. A camera on the Curiosity rover filmed some of the missions landing in 2012, but the Perseverance landing will be recorded from all angles. At various stages, and sometimes simultaneously, multiple cameras will be looking up from the descent stage at the parachute, looking down from the descent stage at the rover, looking up from the rover at the sky crane, and looking down from the rover at the ground.

Its the kind of stuff Ive always been trying to imagine, Chen says. The first video, showing the rover touch down as seen from above, could be released as early as Monday, and high-resolution video from all of the cameras will be released in the following weeks.

Perseverance will also record audio of the descent using one of two microphones. Attached to the left side of the vehicle above the middle wheel, one mic is expected to capture sounds of the engines firing, pyrotechnic devices on the EDL system blowing bolts and severing cables, the rush of the wind, and hopefully those wheels actually crunching down onto the surface of Mars, says David Gruel, the assembly, test, and launch operations manager for Perseverance.

And then, for the first time in history, people will be able to listen to what it sounds like on another planet. The microphone will be sitting there on the surface of Mars, attached to the rover, listening to the ambient noises, Gruel says. It will remain on for about a minute after landing, and it could be switched on again for brief recording sessions as long as its temperature-sensitive parts survive the frigid Martian nights.

A second microphone is attached to the rovers SuperCam, an instrument equipped with a laser to vaporize rocks and determine their composition. That mic will listen to rocks being zapped and maybe even the wheels of Perseverance crunching against the desiccated dirt as it rolls across an alien world.

We use a lot of imagery, but weve never used sound to take part or participate as if youre on another planet, Gruel says. Who knows what exciting discoveries we might have with it.

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Watch NASA land the Perseverance rover on Mars - National Geographic

NASAs Perseverance probe landed safely and on time on Mars, at 3:55 p.m. EST, Thursday, marking another success for the U.S. space agency.

The nuclear-powered probe made its way through a harrowing landing process, deemed by some engineers as seven minutes of terror because it involves parachutes, powered descent and a sky crane that gently lowers Perseverance onto a challenging, rocky area of Martian surface.

After a confirmed safe landing, members of the probes Mission Control erupted in applause and cheers.

NASA has now successfully landed nine of 10 probes sent to the Red Planet.

Minutes after touching down, Perseverance beamed back a black-and-white image from the surface as more applause broke out at Mission Control.

The probe is equipped with a microphone, which should have recorded its descent.

Later Thursday, President Joe Biden sent a congratulatory tweet, saying: "Today proved once again that with the power of science and American ingenuity, nothing is beyond the realm of possibility."

Perseverance, and its helicopterlike companion drone, Ingenuity, began the 300-million-mile journey in July. Ingenuity will test if powered flight can be done in Mars thin atmosphere.

The six-wheeled Perseverance, which looks like the other four rover probes that have landed on Mars, set down in Jezero Crater, which is believed to be an ancient lakebed and a potential source for remnants of ancient life.

Determining if Mars once hosted life is the primary goal of the probes two-year mission.

During its search, the probe will take samples from the Red Planets surface and store them in its 43 sample tubes. NASA plans to send another mission to Mars to retrieve the tubes sometime in the early 2030s.

Before collecting samples, NASA will spend the next weeks making sure Perseverances systems are all working.

You can follow Perseverances progress on its Twitter account.

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Perseverance Probe Successfully Lands on Mars - Voice of America

Ground controllers examine the first images of Jezero Crater taken by NASAs Perseverance rover moments after landing Thursday. Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

NASAs Perseverance Mars rover set down on an ancient lakebed after a flawless plunge into the Martian atmosphere Thursday, achieving an unprecedented pinpoint landing while delivering the most sophisticated suite of science payloads ever flown to another planet.

The $2.4 billion Perseverance rover arrived at Jezero Crater, a basin that scientists say was once flooded with liquid water, after a nail-biting descent to the Red Planets rust-colored surface.

Wow! We have a science mission, said Ken Farley, Perseverance project scientist from NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The nuclear-powered mobile robot capped a seven-month journey from a launch pad at Cape Canaveral with a high-speed dive into the Martian atmosphere. A heat shield cocooned the rover as it streaked through the rarefied air at more than 12,100 mph (19,500 kilometers per hour).

After surviving temperatures near 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit (1,300 degrees Celsius), the rover deployed a supersonic parachute, which billowed open to slow the spacecraft to subsonic speed. Perseverance next jettisoned its heat shield, allowing a landing radar and cameras to scan the Martian surface for a safe touchdown site.

The rovers aerodynamic backshell then released Perseverances rocket-powered descent stage to do the rest of the braking before landing. Eight throttleable engines on the rocket pack slowed the crafts speed to nearly 0 mph, and Nylon cords lowered the one-ton rover to the surface.

Once Perseverances wheels contacted Mars, the descent stage cut the cords and diverted to crash a safe distance away, leaving the rover safely on the ground at Jezero Crater.

We arrived at Mars moving at about 12,000 mph roughly, and just in seven short minutes, we had to slow down and gently put Perseverance down in Jezero Crater, said Matt Wallace, Perseverances deputy project manager at JPL. The system just performed flawlessly, getting through 10 or 12 Gs of deceleration, the supersonic parachute deployment, eight big main engines had to fire ,our terrain relative navigation hazard avoidance system had to perform the way it was designed. Its never easy.

Within minutes, the rover beamed back two low-resolution black-and-white images from its hazard cameras, providing the first-ever views of Jezeros landscape. The images are a taste of whats to come, and scientists expect to have high-definition video, color panoramas, and the first sound recordings from Mars beginning as soon as Friday.

In a post-landing press conference, Wallace said Perseverance is in great shape after arriving on Mars, and is ready for the next phase of a mission packed with firsts.

Ground teams were along for the ride Thursday. With Mars positioned some 127 million miles (204 million kilometers) from Earth, the one-way travel time for radio signals Thursday was more than 11 minutes.

That meant Perseverance followed pre-programmed commands and employed control software to land itself.

The vehicle is going on a roller coaster ride, and you are, too, said Allen Chen, Perseverances entry, descent, and landing lead at JPL.

Things seem to be working the way you want them to go, and you start feeling good then your stomach drops, then things are OK again, Chen said.

Its an emotional roller coaster ride all the way down, and youre second-guessing yourself as you go, even though its already happened, Chen said, referring to the 11-minute time way. Its kind of crazy.

Ground teams at JPL were physically distanced across multiple control rooms due to the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. Many members of the science team monitored the landing remotely.

But the engineers gathered at JPL let out a roar of applause, cheers, and exchanged fist bumps as telemetry confirmed Perseverances successful landing at 3:55 p.m. EST (2055 GMT).

Perseverance reused the same landing architecture demonstrated by NASAs Curiosity rover when it landed on Mars in August 2012. But with nearly a decade of innovation since Curiosity, engineers upgraded Perseverances navigation algorithms to enable a more precise landing.

The rover Thursday navigated to a safe landing site free of steep slopes and boulders. Past Mars landers, without the new terrain relative navigation capability, could have not even attempted a landing on the rugged topography at Jezero Crater, according to NASA.

Chen said the rover ended up about 1.1 miles (1.7 kilometers) from the center of the landing zone.

President Joe Biden called Steve Jurczyk, NASAs acting administrator, to congratulate the Perseverance team after the landing Thursday afternoon. The White House also tweeted a picture of Biden watching the landing from the White House.

Perseverance is the ninth U.S. spacecraft to successfully land on Mars since the Viking missions in 1976. Two international Mars missions the Hope orbiter from the United Arab Emirates and the Tianwen 1 orbiter, lander, and rover from China arrived at the Red Planet earlier this month.

The Chinese Tianwen 1 mission will release its lander and rover to descend to the Martian surface in May or June.

But NASAs Perseverance rover, also known as Mars 2020, has the most ambitious goals of any Mars mission to date.

The rovers primary objective is to search for signs of past life and gather rock samples for return to Earth by future spacecraft in development by NASA and the European Space Agency.

NASA says it spent more than $2.4 billion to design, build and prepare the Mars 2020 mission for launch. With the money budgeted to operate the rover during the trip to Mars, and for around two Earth years (one Mars year) after landing, the total mission will cost around $2.7 billion.

The 2,260-pound (1,025-kilogram) Perseverance rover is about 10 feet (3 meters) long, 9 feet (2.7 meters wide), and 7 feet (2.2 meters) tall.

Jezero Crater, Perseverances landing site, was home to an ancient river delta and a lake the size of Lake Tahoe some 3.5 billion to 3.9 billion years ago. Scientists hope to find signatures of ancient life in the rocks and sediments deposited in the dried-up delta.

This is our first mobile astrobiologist, said Lori Glaze, head of NASAs planetary science division. One of its main purposes is to seek out those signs of past life on Mars.

Perseverance was designed to land as close to the delta deposits as possible. Farley said Thursday the rover ended up near the intersection of two geologic units, and the missions scientific targets will likely be the rocks visible in Perseverances first post-landing images.

The rover was expected to downlink sharper images from its hazard cameras Thursday night through a communications relay with the European ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, along with the first views from cameras that recorded high-resolution views throughout the spacecrafts descent. Perseverance carried 25 cameras to Mars, more than any previous mission to the Red Planet.

Wallace said NASA aims to release the new imagery during a press conference Friday.

For the first time, were going to be able to see ourselves, in high-definition video, land on another planet, Wallace said Thursday.

Commercial ruggedized cameras were pointing up at the rovers supersonic parachute, and one on the descent stage looked down at the rover as it prepared for touchdown suspended under Nylon bridles. Other cameras mounted on the rover were programmed to record views looking up and down during the landing.

We think we have captured some pretty spectacular video, and they come with a microphone as well, Wallace said. Perseverance has the first microphones flown to Mars.

I think thats really going to be something to see, he said.

Ground teams have mapped out a carefully-choreographed activation and test sequence for Perseverance over the next several weeks. The rover opened lens covers and released its high-gain communications antenna soon after landing Thursday. If all goes well, the high-gain antenna could obtain a lock with NASAs Deep Space Network as soon as Friday to enable faster data transfers between Earth and Mars, according to Jennifer Trosper, Perseverances deputy project manager at JPL.

Trosper said engineers will spend the first five days known as sols on Mars after landing to stabilize the rovers power, thermal, and communications systems before loading a software update into the spacecrafts computers next week.

A remote sensing mast with the rovers panoramic cameras, science instruments, and a Martian weather station will be raised Saturday, according to Trosper. In parallel with the rover checkouts, controllers will run the rovers seven scientific payloads through health tests and recharge Perseverances battery, fed by a radioactive plutonium power source.

Perseverance will take its first color panoramas this weekend.

After uploading updated software next week, ground teams at JPL will unlimber the rovers robotic arm and send commands for Perseverance to perform its first test drive, likely by rolling about 16 feet (5 meters) forward and background.

One of Perseverances first tasks after completing post-landing checkouts will be to drive to a nearby location to release NASAs Ingenuity helicopter from the rovers belly pan. The rover will drive away to a distance of at least 330 feet (100 meters) before the helicopter flies for the first time.

That moment will be historic. The tiny 4-pound (1.8-kilogram) robot will try to become the first aircraft to fly through the atmosphere of another planet.

Human beings have never flown a rotorcraft outside of our own Earths atmosphere, so this will be very much a Wright Brothers moment, except at another planet, said MiMi Aung, project manager for the Ingenuity helicopter at JPL, in an interview before Perseverances launch last July.

Trosper said Perseverance might be ready to start moving to the helicopter test site in about three weeks, and it might take about 10 days to reach the flight location, depending on the site selected by NASA managers.

Ground controllers will program the helicopter to perform a series of test flights during a planned 30-day campaign, beginning with a relatively simple up-and-down flight lasting less than 30 seconds, Aung said. Then the team will attempt more daring test flights.

The helicopter will fly autonomously, without real-time input from ground controllers millions of miles away. The drone carries two cameras, and telemetry from the helicopter will be routed through a base station on the rover. The Perseverance rover also might be able to take pictures of the helicopter in flight.

NASA officials approved adding the helicopter to the Mars 2020 mission in 2018. The mission cost around $80 million to design and develop, and will cost another $5 million to operate. Agency officials hope the helicopter will prove out aerial reconnaissance as a new method of interplanetary exploration.

Wallace, Perseverances deputy project manager, said this week the Ingenuity helicopter is much like NASAs Sojourner rover, which became the first mobile scout on Mars in 1997 and paved the way for future rovers.

I worked on Sojourner, and there was a lot of uncertainty at the time as to whether or not wed ever really be able to utilize this technology, and we found very quickly that having a mobile capability on the surface of Mars was incredibly valuable, Wallace said. When you look at Ingenuity, it looks very much the same. Its a technology demonstration. Its objective is not tied into the science of this mission. But the potential for aerial reconnaissance and exploration in the future, using this type of technology, is is terrific. Its not just on Mars, but other places as well.

Trosper said Perseverance could be in position for the helicopter test flights this spring, then will move into the missions science campaign to begin examining the geology and ancient habitability of Jezero Crater.

That will lead to the first use of the rovers drill to extract core samples from rocks in the summer, she said.

Members of Perseverances team say the hardware necessary to collect the rock samples and seal them inside ultra-clean tubes was the most complex undertaking of NASAs Mars program to date. The rover has 43 sample tubes on-board, each sheathed in a gold-colored cylindrical enclosure, providing an extra layer of contamination protection. The tubes rode to Mars inside the housings, and they will be returned to their sheaths once filled with Martian rock samples.

The tubes are about the size and shape of a slim cigar, and the 43 cylinders include witness tubes or blanks,which will allow scientists to cross-check rock and sediment specimens returned to Earth for contamination.

Those samples tubes are part of a Sample and Caching System, which is one of our biggest engineering developments for this mission, said Adam Steltzner, chief engineer on the Mars 2020 mission, before the launch last year. We get to Mars largely like the Curiosity rover got to Mars, but we need to do something very different once were on Mars. We must take these core samples, seal them hermetically and sterilely, and then produce a cache of samples for eventual return to Earth.

The rover has a 7-foot-long (2-meter) robotic arm with a coring drill fixed on a 99-pound (45-kilogram) turret on the end. The longer robotic arm will work in concert with a smaller 1.6-foot-long (0.5-meter) robotic manipulator inside the belly of the rover, which will pick up sample tubes for transfer to the main arm for drilling.

Steltzner said the rovers sampling system actually consists of three different robots.

Out at the end of our robotic arm thats the first robot is a coring drill that uses rotary percussive action like we have used similarly and previously on Mars with the Curiosity mission, except rather just generating powder, this creates an annular groove in the rock and breaks off a core sample, Steltzner said.

During each sample collection, the core sample will go directly into the tube attached to the drill.

That bit and the sample tube are brought back by the robotic arm our first robot into the second robot, our bit carousel, which receives the filled sample tube and delivers it to a very fine and detailed robot, the sample handling arm inside the belly of the beast, in which the sample is then assessed, its volume is measured, images are taken, and it is sealed and placed back into storage for eventually being placed in a cache on the surface.

The portion of the caching system inside the rover is called the Adaptive Caching Assembly, which consists of more than 3,000 parts alone.

The design of the drill and sample tubes is intended to preserve the distribution minerals cored from Martian rocks. The system is also intended to collect samples directly from softer soils.

Besides the sampling system, Perseverance hosts seven scientific instruments.

Two of the instruments, named PIXL and SHERLOC, are located alongside the coring drill on the robotic arms turret. Theywill scan Martian rocks to determine their chemical composition and search for organic materials, providing key inputs into decisions by ground teams on which rocks to drill.

The Perseverance rover also carries the SuperCam instrument,an intricate suite of sensors, including a camera, laser and spectrometers, designed to zap Martian rocks from more than 20 feet (6 meters) away to measure their chemical and mineral make-up, with the ability to identify organic molecules.

Developed by an international team in the United States, France and Spain, the SuperCam instrument is an upgraded version of the ChemCam instrument currently operating on NASAs Curiosity Mars rover.

The instruments mounted inside the rovers main body include MOXIE, whichwill demonstrate the production of oxygen from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Mars, a capability that future astronaut explorers could use on the Red Planet. A Norwegian-developed ground-penetrating radar on the rover named RIMFAX will study the planets underground geologic structure, yielding data on subsurface layers and soil strength which could help designers of larger landers designed to carry people to Mars.

The mission also carries a weather station and the first camera on Mars with a zoom function. That camera system, located on top of Perseverances remote sensing mast to be raised this weekend, is named Mastcam-Z and will record video and 360-degree panoramas.

The differences between Perseverance and NASAs predecessor Curiosity rover do not stop at the science payload or the Ingenuity helicopter.

The Perseverance roveralso features aluminum wheels with thicker skin and modified treads to avoid damage observed on Curiositys wheels on Mars.NASAs new Mars rover weighs about 278 pounds (126 kilograms) more than Curiosity.

The benefit of another decade of technological advancement since Curiositys launch, and the budding fruits of NASAs partnership with ESA on a Mars Sample Return program, moves scientists closer to addressing the question of whether life took hold elsewhere in the solar system.

Assuming Perseverances mission is a success, and funding and technical plans remain on track, NASA and ESA could launch missions as soon as 2026 with a European-built Mars rover to retrieve the specimens collected by the Mars 2020 mission. The rover will deliver the material to a U.S.-supplied solid-fueled booster to shoot the samples from Mars into space, a feat never before attempted on another planet.

A separate spacecraft provided by ESA will link up with the samples in orbit around Mars, then head for Earth before releasing a NASA re-entry capsule containing the Martian material to complete the first round-trip interplanetary mission no earlier than 2031.

Then scientists will get to work analyzing the samples. They will look for chemical signatures in the core samples that might suggest life once existed on Mars.

Among other objectives, NASAs two Viking landers carried instruments to search for signs of life on Mars when they landed on the Red Planet in 1976. But the robotic landers did not produce any verifiable confirmation of life, andMars missions since Viking have followed the trail of water, seeking evidence that the Red Planet once harbored environments that could have supported basic life forms.

Two other NASA robots are still exploring the surface of Mars. Curiosity has been surveying Mount Sharp in Gale Crater since 2012, and the stationary InSight seismic station landed on Mars in 2018.

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NASA rover reaches Mars on mission in search for signs of past life Spaceflight Now - Spaceflight Now