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NASA’s MARS PERSERVERENCE rover has landed on the red planet, the space agency announced.
The landing on Mars was scheduled for 8:55 a.m., and the rover landed in Jezero crater without complications.
Your mission is to search for signs of ancient life and explore and collect samples for the future return to Earth from various environments on Mars.
Perseverance will spend the next few years searching for signs of ancient microbial life on a mission that will bring samples from Mars to Earth and pave the way for future human visitors.
Images of Mars are broadcast live on Piccadilly Lights in London
Source: PA
The research destination for the rover, a car-sized scientific laboratory, is Jezero Crater, a 45-kilometer-wide depression containing sediment from an ancient river delta.
Scientists know that 3.5 billion years ago, Jezero was the site of a large lake, with its own delta.
They believe that while the water may have disappeared a long time ago, somewhere within the crater, or perhaps along its 2,000-foot-high (610-meter) rim, evidence that life ever existed there could be. expecting.
Any search for these signals will include the rover’s cameras, especially Mastcam-Z, which is located on the rover’s mast.
You can zoom in to inspect scientifically interesting targets.
The mission’s science team may commission Perseverance’s SuperCam instrument, also on the mast, to fire a laser at a promising target, generating a small cloud of plasma that can be analyzed to help determine its chemical composition.
If that data is intriguing enough, the team could order the rover’s robotic arm to come in for a closer look.
Perseverance will collect rock and soil samples with its drill, and store the sample cores in tubes on the Martian surface ready for a return mission to bring around 30 samples to Earth in the early 2030s.
Selected samples will be collected by drilling several centimeters and then sealed in sample tubes and stored in the rover.
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When the rover reaches a suitable location, a cache of tubes will be dropped on the surface of Mars to be picked up by the Sample Fetch Rover, which is being developed by Airbus at Stevenage, which will take them to the Nasa Mars Ascent vehicle.
Perseverance also carries the Ingenuity Mars helicopter, which will fly short distances from the rover in the first attempt at controlled and powered flight on another planet.
A successful helicopter test could lead to more flying probes to survey the landscape on other planets.
It will also test technologies to help astronauts make future expeditions to Mars.
These include testing a method for producing oxygen from the Martian atmosphere, identifying other resources such as groundwater, and improving landing techniques.
They also involve characterizing the weather and other environmental conditions that could affect future astronauts living and working on Mars.
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