How NASA’s Next Generation Perseverance Mars Rover Beats Big Brothers Curiosity

This story is part of Welcome to mars, our series exploring the red planet.

NASA has once again shipped what amounts to the best driverless car to Mars. Perseverance, the rover formerly known as Mars 2020, left Earth on Thursday to become NASA’s successor robot to Curiosity, which has been touring the red planet since 2012.

This next-generation planetary explorer comes from a long line of well-traveled bots with some major improvements over his older brother that should allow scientists to see, touch, and, for the first time, hear Mars in new ways.

Martian audiovisual club

A variety of Mars rovers and orbiters have sent countless views of the red planet houseBut we still have to open a microphone there to capture the sounds of our neighboring planet. Perseverance aims to finally change this by wearing a pair of microphones that will capture the audio of the landing on the planet, as well as ambient noise from another world and the hum of a rover at work.

“Hearing the neck spin, the wheels spinning, or hearing other instruments sound can also be an important engineering diagnostic tool,” said Greg Delory, CEO and co-founder of space hardware company Heliospace. He is an advisor to the Perseverance SuperCam Microphone Team.

SuperCam is the rover’s new scientific instrument that destroys rocks and other materials with a laser while its microphone records the subtle sounds made by different types of rocks as they are destroyed. The SuperCam microphone will also be able to pick up the Martian wind and other sounds from the rover’s environment.

The other on-board microphone is part of the entry, descent, and landing system that includes full-color cameras to capture the entire exciting journey to the surface.

In total, Perseverance is loaded with 23 cameras, most of them color devices. It will be able to capture HD video and stereo 3D panoramas and get closer to a housefly-sized target from more than 100 yards (91 meters) away.

Save it for later

A key part of Perseverance’s mission is to collect samples of rocks and gases from the Martian surface that will then be secured for possible later recovery on a future mission.

A significant portion of the rover’s belly is occupied by instruments for collecting and analyzing Martian geology.

“I can’t wait for the time when these unique samples will one day return to Earth and be available for study by scientists around the world,” planetary scientist Caroline Smith of the UK Museum of Natural History said in a statement. Smith is working with NASA and the European Space Agency to plan how the samples will heal after they are delivered to Earth.

The sample return mission is part of one of the biggest goals for perseverance: looking for evidence of past lives on Mars. Jezero Crater, where the rover will land, is believed to have once been home to a large body of water the size of Lake Tahoe, making it a prime location for life in the distant past.

A flying companion

Perseverance will be entirely based on Mars, but it is carrying something new and exciting: the first helicopter to fly through the thin atmosphere of our neighboring planet.

Dubbed ingenuity, the small helicopter is stored in the belly of the scout vehicle, to be ejected to the surface for some flight tests. This should be very interesting since we have never flown on another planet and the atmosphere of Mars is very different from that of Earth.

In other words, don’t expect too much from this little space drone. But if it works, it could mean huge benefits (sorry) for how we explore other worlds in the future.

Preparation for Elon and other human visitors.

One of the stated goals of the Perseverance mission is to make key breakthroughs that support the future arrival of real people to become the first (or at least the newest) Martians.

The rover is outfitted with experiments like Moxie, Mars’ in-situ oxygen resource utilization experiment, which will test a way to extract oxygen from literal Martian air. It will also use instruments to see how the ubiquitous dust in that air could affect human life support systems and other key technologies.

Other experiments will search for groundwater, study the Martian atmosphere, climate, and climate, and assess its impact on potential human explorers.

Stylish new wheels and a stronger arm.

The engineers took some lessons learned from Curiosity and the punishment given to it by the sharp and pointed Martian rocks and applied them to reinforce the wheels of Perseverance. They are narrower, but have a larger diameter and are made of thicker aluminum. This and all of his new tools make perseverance heavier than his older brother.

Handling all of those tools also requires a larger “hand” or turret on the end of your robotic arm. The arm extends 7 feet (2 meters), ending in the 99-pound (45-kilogram) rotating turret that holds a scientific camera, chemical analyzers, and a rock drill. It is practically the last glove of power.

Curiosity had a similar setup, but the turret at Perseverance weighs 33 percent more because it has larger instruments and a drill intended to cut intact rock cores to collect samples for storage.

All in all, Perseverance is the most advanced robot to visit Mars so far, and if all goes well, it could be one of the last to make the journey alone without human companions.