A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket carrying NASA nuclear energy. Perseverance Mars rover it roared to life and took off from Cape Canaveral early Thursday morning, the first step in a decade-long program to look for signs of past microbial life and collect samples of rock and soil for its eventual return to Earth.
The $ 2.4 billion rover will take seven months to reach Mars. When it arrives in February, it will descend to the floor of a 28-mile-wide crater near the remains of an ancient river delta and deposits in the lake bed where traces of past biological activity could be preserved.
Along with collecting samples to be retrieved later by a European rover, Perseverance will leave a $ 80 million experimental helicopter which will float on the surface during the first “Wright Brothers moment” on Mars. It will test the technology that astronauts could one day use to live off the Earth by extracting oxygen from the thin atmosphere of carbon dioxide.
Perseverance is the third Mars probe launched in the past two weeks, after the spacecraft sent by the United Arab Emirates and China. It is also the most ambitious, based on the success of eight previous landings on Mars.
This is the first NASA mission explicitly designed to look for signs of life in another world.
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“We are doing transformative science,” said Matt Wallace, deputy project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “For the first time, we are looking for signs of life on another planet. And for the first time, we are going to collect samples that will be part of, we hope, the first sample to come back from another planet. And there are many other developments along the way.”
After months of careful assembly and testing amid coronavirus work restrictions, the long-awaited mission finally kicked off at 7:50 a.m. EDT when the Atlas 5 RD-180 first-stage engine started in Russia and four solid-powered belt drives. generating a combination of 2.3 million pounds of thrust.
The 197-foot-tall rocket and its payload tipped the balance at approximately 1.2 million pounds, and excess take-off power resulted in a faster-than-usual climb away from launch complex 41 at the Air Force Station from Cape Canaveral.
In just 35 seconds, the Atlas 5 was traveling faster than sound, and four minutes later, when the RD-180 shut down and the first stage fell, the vehicle was more than 300 miles from the launch site, nearly 100 miles to up and moving at over 13,400 mph.
At that time, the powerful hydrogen-powered Centaur second stage took over, continuing the climb into space with an Aerojet Rocketdyne RL10C-1 engine. Two Centaur shots were required to propel the Perseverance rover and its planetary cruise stage to an escape velocity from Earth of approximately 26,000 mph.
The Centaur’s flight computer was programmed to unleash the rover and cruise stage on a precise trajectory toward a point in space 292 million miles away, where Mars will be next February.
The rover’s descent to the surface, known as “seven minutes of terror,” will begin when it plunges into the Martian atmosphere at more than 12,000 mph, its heat shield withstands temperatures as high as 2,370 degrees before its rocket-powered “sky crane” . the jet pack lowers it to the surface at the end of a strap.
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The target landing site, Jezero Crater, features an ancient river channel running through an edge and a clearly visible delta that unfolds on the crater floor. The river that once flowed, about 3 to 4 billion years ago, filled a basin the size of Lake Tahoe.
“A delta is where you get the deposition of very fine-grained (material), basically a mud,” said project scientist Ken Farley. “Then the mud comes in, takes it downstream, hits the loose lake water, and the mud settles.
“The beauty of this is that everything that is carried by the river that could have been alive, or the things that lived in the lake, will be buried in this (favorable) environment … So we know we have a livable environment with a high preservation potential. “
Named after a seventh grader from Virgina after a national competition, Perseverance is equipped with a complex sample collection and packaging system. As the mission progresses, a drill at the end of a robotic arm will collect core samples that will be sealed in small, ultra-clean tubes and deposited at precise locations.
The long-range plan requires a NASA lander to deliver a European Space Agency space vehicle to obtain the samples. The rover will return to the lander, loading the samples onto a NASA-supplied rocket that will launch a sample container into Mars orbit. A European spacecraft will capture the container and bring it back to Earth in 2031.
“If it sounds complicated, it is,” said Lori Glaze, director of planetary science at NASA headquarters. “But NASA’s investments in the development of autonomous robots and the landing of large loads on Mars have laid the foundation for a successful sample return campaign.”
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