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After a seven-month journey, NASA’s Perseverance rover prepares to land on Mars on Thursday after negotiating for the first time a risky landing procedure that will mark the start of its search for several years of signs of ancient microbial life.
The Mars 2020 mission, which departed from Florida in late July, includes the largest vehicle ever sent to the Red Planet.
Built at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, it weighs one ton, has a seven-foot (two-meter) long robotic arm, has 19 cameras and two microphones to record the Martian soundscape.
If it arrives intact, Perseverance will be only the fifth rover to successfully complete the journey from Pathfinder in 1997. All have been Americans and the last one, Curiosity, is still active.
Last week, China placed its Tianwen-1 spacecraft in orbit around Mars with a lander and a rover, which is expected to land in May.
Around 3:55 pm EST (2:25 am IST) Thursday, Perseverance will place its six wheels on a landing site described as “spectacular” by Ken Farley, a NASA scientist.
Jezero Crater, a 45-kilometer-wide basin located in the Martian Northern Hemisphere, had been considered for previous missions, but was considered too difficult to land until now.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the mission control room will have fewer people than normal.
“But assuming we have confirmation of the landing, I don’t think COVID can prevent us from jumping up and down and shaking our fists,” said Matt Wallace, deputy director of projects for the mission.
The first photos of the surface in low resolution will arrive quickly. Video footage is expected later, including entry into the atmosphere.
Lakes and rivers
Scientists believe that about 3.5 billion years ago, the crater housed a river that emptied into a lake, depositing sediment in a fan-shaped delta.
During this period, “Mars was very similar to Earth in several important ways,” Farley said.
“It had a substantial atmosphere, it had lakes and rivers on its surface, and it had habitable environments, places where organisms that we know on earth today could have thrived.”
Mars is the only known place where such conditions arose outside of our planet.
Mars 2020 is the first mission with the explicit goal of finding evidence that life ever existed there.
Over the course of several years, Perseverance will collect and store up to 30 rock and soil samples that will eventually be returned to Earth where labs will analyze them.
Its top speed is 152 meters per hour (about 0.1 miles per hour), slow by Earth standards but faster than any of its predecessors as it traverses first the delta, then the ancient lake shore, and finally the edges of the crater.
The rover could return the samples as part of a planned joint mission between NASA and the European Space Agency in the 2030s.
“The scientists who will analyze these samples are in school today, they may not even have been born yet,” Farley said.
Producing oxygen
What would these long-awaited signs of life look like? “We shouldn’t be looking for fossil teeth or fossil bones or fossil leaves,” he said.
Rather, it is looking for organic molecules and other signs of past microbial life, a discovery that would be “fabulous.”
However, the first months of the mission will not be devoted to this main objective. Parallel experiments are also planned.
In particular, NASA wants to fly, for the first time, a powered plane on another planet. The helicopter, called Ingenuity, must be able to ascend in an atmosphere just one percent the density of Earth.
Another goal is to help pave the way for future human missions, by developing a system that can convert oxygen in the atmosphere primarily to carbon dioxide from Mars, like a plant.
The space agency is deploying an instrument called the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE), which uses a process called electrolysis to produce about 10 grams of oxygen per hour.
NASA is spending roughly $ 2.4 billion (roughly Rs. 17,430 crore) on the Mars 2020 trillion. Landing and operating the rover costs around $ 300 million (roughly Rs. 2,180 crore).
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