NASA is delaying the launch of the next Mars rover, called Perseverance, for a week, due to a problem with the rocket the spacecraft is supposed to send to the Red Planet. The rover is now slated to launch no earlier than July 30 from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
That puts Perseverance’s release dangerously close to the end of its limited release window, which originally spanned July 17-Aug. 11. NASA and other space agencies only have a small window of time every two years to send spacecraft to Mars, when the Red Planet gets closer to Earth in its orbit around the Sun. NASA has already delayed launch several times before. , until July 20 and then until July 22, due to problems with the ground team supporting the launch. If NASA misses the opportunity to launch Perseverance this summer, the agency would have to wait until 2022 to try again.
However, NASA announced today that the rover’s launch window will run for a few days until August 15, according to a blog post. And flight crews are analyzing whether the window can be further extended in August. Still, there isn’t much time left to take off this vehicle.
NASA attributes the delay to a problem that arose in the Perseverance rocket, an Atlas V rocket manufactured and operated by the United Launch Alliance. The company conducted a general test of the rocket on June 22, filling it with propellant and reviewing all procedures to practice actual launch. During that test, a line of sensors that monitors the liquid oxygen booster levels in the vehicle returned incorrect data, and the ULA team needs additional time to figure out what went wrong and fix the problem.
Preparing perseverance for launch this summer has already been an arduous process for the mission team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. On March 12, JPL ordered that most people on the premises have to work from home, and the team had to continue working on the vehicle while practicing social distancing, instituting new disinfection measures, and communicating with other employees at remotely. All the while, the launch window of the rapidly approaching rover this summer loomed over everyone.
“Instead of his first priority being mission success and getting to the launch pad, his first priority is moving immediately, and now it’s people’s safety,” said Matt Wallace, deputy project manager for Perseverance, during a video. “And it took a lot of work putting things together to keep going, keep working safely, stay healthy, and keep the project on time.”
When the rover launches, Perseverance is designed to search for signs of life on the Red Planet that may have existed billions of years ago. The rover is also equipped with tools that will drill through Martian soil and unearth samples that will remain on the planet’s surface. NASA hopes to collect those samples someday during a second mission in the future and then take them home to Earth, where scientists can study them in a laboratory. Known as a sample return mission from Mars, this project would really help scientists better characterize what Mars was like in the past and whether the Red Planet hosted life long ago.
