the Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopters are on their way to Mars, beginning their quest to find ancient signs of life, fly the skies of the red planet, and take a trip so that humans will one day follow suit.
“It is a really important mission with the best opportunity in my life to discover evidence of life in other parts of the solar system,” David Flannery, a member of the Perseverance science team and long-term planner for the mission, told CNET.
NASA’s Next Generation Robotic Explorers Deceased earth in the early morning sunshine off the Florida coast aboard the United Launch Alliance Atlas V. Just 20 minutes before Thursday’s launch, a magnitude 4.5 earthquake shook NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory across the continent in Pasadena, California, but did not lessen the thrill of the launch. Even a global pandemic I couldn’t stop it.
At 7:50 am local time / 4:50 am PT, the main engine and four rocket thrusters fired at the Atlas rocket, a vehicle that rises higher than the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The rocket took off from the Cape Canaveral launch pad with a dazzling stream of fire, steam, and smoke.
The separation of the Mars 2020 spacecraft from the propeller rocket occurred just an hour after launch. NASA’s two interplanetary automata are now on their journey and will travel nearly 350 million miles on a nearly seven-month journey to the red planet.
The trip to launch was much longer.
Eight years ago nasa announced that it would build a rover from Mars close up modeling Curiosity, which set out for the red planet in 2011. Fighting government budget cuts, NASA essentially improvised the rover, sometimes using leftover parts from its predecessor, and Perseverance was born. For scientists like Flannery, Perseverance was not just a name. Before launch, he said he was nervous and optimistic that takeoff was taking a long time to arrive for the NASA science team.
“Most of us have been working on it for the better part of a decade,” he said.
Perseverance is a All-in-one mobile science lab. Like its predecessor, it is about the size of a car, but it contains a large turret on the end of a robotic arm and thicker, stronger wheels. The nuclear powered vehicle contains seven scientific instruments, two microphones, and 23 cameras: nine for engineering, seven for conducting experiments, and seven for watching the rover descend to the surface. Will be able to produce stunning images like those broadcast by CuriosityBut it’s also an incredibly capable alien search device, based on NASA’s previous and current exploration of the Red Planet.
“Pre-Mars missions examined geology and revealed a story in which the red planet had oceans and rivers billions of years ago,” said Alan Duffy, an astronomer at Swinburne University and chief scientist at the Royal Institution of Australia.
“Perseverance will look for the chemical signs of life within that geology, allowing us to better say how habitable the world was.”
However, it will be a long time before the surface data begins to leak back to Earth, and there are a plethora of items to mark the Perseverance target list.
A trail of smoke follows Atlas V as it leaves Earth.
NASA / Joel Kowsky
The next milestone is, of course, to land on Mars and overcome the so-called “seven minutes of terror”: 420 seconds between hitting the atmosphere of Mars and landing on its surface.
“Landing is the really difficult part,” Flannery said. “We have some heritage with this particular mission: the landing system worked with Curiosity. I am optimistic.”
The maneuver is scheduled for February 2021. If all goes as planned, perseverance will finally roll over the dusty soil of Mars and begin its scientific mission. Perseverance’s onboard scientific payload includes an X-ray fluorescence instrument, spectroscopy instruments, and various radars. Together, they will allow Perseverance to observe the chemistry of your landing site, Jezero Crater.
“Jezero Crater was once an ancient lake filled with water about 3.5 billion years ago and the conditions are ideal for looking for possible traces of ancient life,” said Brendan Burns, an astrobiologist at the University of New South Wales, Australia. The mission plans to snatch dirt and sediment from Jezero and plans to cache those samples and leave them on the surface of Mars for future missions.
“The rover is collecting rocks on Mars that will eventually be brought back to Earth for analysis,” said Bonnie Teece, a Ph.D. student at the University of New South Wales. “Those precious grams of Martian rock could totally change our understanding of our closest neighbor.”
For students like Teece, perseverance offers many opportunities. Duffy notes that the rover could continue to produce data for years to come.
“Generations of scientists depend on this mission that successfully launches from our planet and lands on another,” he said.
The interplanetary highway between Earth and Mars is as busy as ever. In the past two weeks, the United Arab Emirates and China have sent missions to the red planet.. The United Arab Emirates launched an atmospheric probe known as Hope, which aims to examine Mars from orbit and provide a holistic view of the planet’s atmospheric cycles, potentially answering long-standing questions about its unusual gas composition. China, by contrast, is trying a mission to land on the surface of Mars. Their Tianwen-1 Mission It is made up of three spacecraft: an orbiter, a lander, and a currently unnamed rover.
Perseverance and ingenuity follow, but are not far behind.
“This is a monumental occasion,” said Burns. “The candle has been lit.”
