CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AP) – With eight successful landings on Mars, NASA is upping the ante with its new scout vehicle.
The Perseverance spacecraft, scheduled for launch this week, is NASA’s largest and smartest Martian rover to date.
It has the latest landing technology, plus most cameras and microphones ever assembled to capture the sights and sounds of Mars. Its super-sanitized sample return tubes, for rocks that might contain evidence of past Martian life, are the cleanest items ever put into space. A helicopter is even advancing for a test flight from another world.
The third and final mission this summer to Mars, after the UAE Hope Orbiter and China’s Quest for Heavenly Truth orbiter-rover combo, begins with a launch scheduled for Thursday morning from Cape Canaveral. Like the other spacecraft, Perseverance is due to hit the red planet next February after a journey spanning seven months and more than 300 million miles (480 million km).
NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine doesn’t see it as a competition. “But we certainly welcome more explorers to deliver more science than ever,” he said after a launch review on Monday, “and we look forward to seeing what they can discover.”
Here’s a look at perseverance:
PERSEVERANCE VS. CURIOSITY:
The car-sized, six-wheel Perseverance is a mimic of NASA’s Curiosity rover, which has been on Mars since 2012, but with more updates and volume. Its 7-foot (2-meter) robotic arm has a stronger grip and a larger drill to collect rock samples, and is packed with 23 cameras, most of them in color, plus two more in Ingenuity, the hitchhiking helicopter. . The cameras will provide the first glimpse of a parachute opening on Mars, with two microphones allowing Earthlings to spy for the first time. Once home to a river and lake delta, Jezero Crater is NASA’s riskiest Martian landing site yet due to rocks and cliffs, hopefully avoided by the ship’s own navigation systems space. Perseverance also has more self-driving ability, so it can cover more ground than curiosity. The improvements make the price of the mission higher: almost $ 3 billion.
SAMPLE COLLECTION:
Perseverance will pierce the rocks most likely to contain signs of ancient life and hide the collection in the ground to wait for a future rover. Forty-three sample tubes are on board this rover, each carefully washed and baked to kill terrestrial microbes. NASA wants to avoid introducing organic molecules from Earth into the returning Martian samples. Each tube can hold half an ounce (15 grams) of core samples, and the goal is to collect about a pound (0.5 kilograms) in total to return to Earth. NASA hopes to launch the collection mission in 2026 and retrieve the samples on Earth by 2031, at the earliest.
HELICOPTER DEMO:
The 4-pound (1.8 kilogram) helicopter, Ingenuity, will travel to Mars by grabbing the belly of the rover and, a few months after landing, attempt to fly alone. Once it falls on the Martian surface, Ingenuity will start as a baby bird, rising 10 feet (3 meters) in the planet’s extremely thin atmosphere and flying forward up to 6 feet (2 meters). With each attempt, he will try to go a little higher and further. “It really is like the Wright brothers’ moment,” said project manager MiMi Aung. She has a month to squeeze out as many helicopter jumps as possible before the rover continues with more pressing geological work. The future could see next-generation helicopters exploring distant Martian territory in search of astronauts or even robots.
HUMAN BENEFITS:
In addition to the helicopter, Perseverance conducts other experiments that could directly benefit astronauts on Mars. An instrument the size of a car battery will convert atmospheric carbon dioxide to oxygen, an essential ingredient for rocket boosters and breathing systems. Another instrument, laser zapping rocks to identify organic and mineral molecules, carries samples of space suit material. NASA wants to see how fabrics resist the harsh Martian environment. It will be the 2030s at best, according to NASA, before astronauts venture to Mars.
COOL STOWAWAYS:
A pair of Martian meteorites are eventually heading home, or at least splinters of them to be used as calibration targets by laser firing instruments aboard Perseverance. Other cool stowaways: silicon chips named after nearly 11 million people who signed up, as well as a small plaque showing Earth and Mars on opposite sides of the sun with the “explore as one” message in Morse code hidden in solar rays. There is also a plaque that pays tribute to medical workers at the front of the pandemic. The coronavirus prevents hundreds of scientists and other team members from traveling to Cape Canaveral for launch.
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The Associated Press Department of Health and Science is supported by the Department of Scientific Education at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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