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From NASA Perseverance rover continues to catch up on the Red Planet.
As The Perfect Landing of Perseverance on February 18, the rover team has been methodically testing its seven science instruments and various subsystems. For example, Perseverance has just deployed its wind sensor, as shown in before-and-after photos captured by the six-wheeled robot’s navigation cameras.
The wind sensor is part of the Perseverance weather station, which is called the Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA). The instrument will monitor air temperature, humidity, radiation, dust, and wind at Perseverance’s landing site, the floor of the Jezero crater, a 28-mile-wide (45-kilometer) hole in the ground that housed a deep lake and a delta of a river in the ancient past.
Live updates: NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover mission
Congratulations to the MEDA team! Look what it just unfolded !! The wind sensor! @estrellasycafe You must be very excited! Find more photos at: https://t.co/MTE3cqSBDd # mars2020 pic.twitter.com/FiGbSTvqYnMarch 1, 2021
Perseverance, the heart of NASA’s $ 2.7 billion Mars 2020 mission, will search for signs of life within Jezero and collect and store samples for its future return to Earth. But that major scientific work won’t begin immediately after the rover goes live; Perseverance’s first big job will be finding an airfield where his little helicopter buddy can take off.
That helicopter, a 4 pound. (1.8 kg) craft called wit, traveled to Mars in the womb of Perseverance. The device will be deployed to the airfield and attempt the first helicopter flights in a world beyond Earth, demonstrating technology that could pave the way for an entirely new Mars exploration strategy.
The Ingenuity flights will likely take place this spring, and scientific and sampling work will begin in earnest in the summer, members of the mission team said.
But the early days of Perseverance on Mars are far from boring. The rover team has already released more than 6,300 photos of Jezero from the rover, many of them spectacular high-resolution shots taken with Perseverance’s Mastcam-Z camera system. You can find them here. Happy tourism!
Mike Wall is the author of “Out there“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book on the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
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