NASA’s Perseverance rover prepares for Mars landing

NASA’s Perseverance rover prepares for Mars landing

NASA is gearing up for “seven minutes of terror” as it prepares to land a new robotic rover on the surface of Mars.

After a seven-month journey, Perseverance will attempt to land on the Red Planet, sending the first signals back about 7:55am (AEDT) tomorrow.

To be successful, the SUV-sized spacecraft will need to complete a complex series of steps made famous by Curiosity, the last rover to land on Mars in 2012.

But while Perseverance looks like its predecessor, its mission is very different.

Perseverance is the first rover NASA has sent to Mars with the explicit goal of searching for signs of ancient life, said Thomas Zurbuchen, head of NASA’s science mission.

Perseverance-Touches-Down-on-Mars-today-rapidnews-dailyrapid

“It will attempt to answer a question that has eluded humanity for a generation: whether life has ever existed elsewhere beyond our own planet,” Dr Zurbuchen said.

Going along for the ride is a miniature helicopter called Ingenuity — NASA’s first attempt to fly a drone on another planet.

And it carries experiments that will lay the groundwork for future human missions to Mars.

Perseverance is also the first in a series of missions that will eventually bring samples of rocks back to Earth.

“This is by far the most ambitious set of missions to Mars in history,” deputy project scientist Ken Williford said.

But first it has to land. And that’s not easy.

Once on the surface, Perseverance can use its collection of 25 cameras to take 360-degree colour photos, looking at Mars with both extraordinary reach and detail.

“We can resolve features on the millimetre scale close in to the rover and on the centimetre scale off at the distance. We can see, for example, something and resolve something the size of a housefly at the length of a football field,” said Jim Bell of Arizona State University in Tempe.

Bell is the principal investigator for the two Mastcam-Z cameras, each about the size of a can of tennis balls, that give Perseverance its stereo vision.

Perseverance will be bringing microphones to Mars for the first time, said Sylvestre Maurice, deputy principal investigator for the mission’s SuperCam suite, which comprises a camera, laser and spectrometers.

The microphones will enable scientists to hear the wind on Mars for the first time, which should give clues about turbulence in the atmosphere and temperature changes.

The laser hitting the rocks will also make sounds, said Maurice.

“By just listening to that, we can infer what is the hardness of the rock,” he explained.

“This mission is going to be a feast for the eyes and ears,” said Beegle.

Ingenuity’s debut

Perseverance will also be carrying a key innovation that will eventually help scientists get perspectives they cannot otherwise achieve — a petite, autonomous helicopter called Ingenuity.

Similar in appearance to a recreational drone found on Earth, Ingenuity is a technology demonstrator that will gather data on how the aircraft operates in an atmosphere that is “extremely thin — one percent compared to what we have at Earth,” said MiMi Aung, NASA’s Ingenuity project manager.

What is learned could help develop helicopters that could act as long-range scouts for rovers, get close-in photos of hard-to-reach locations like cliffsides and carry samples back to a central location.

“Larger versions could be an independent explorer directly talking to orbiters and relaying data back to Earth,” said Bob Ballerina, Ingenuity’s chief engineer, during a February webinar held by NASA and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

MOXIE, the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, is designed to convert carbon dioxide from Mars’ atmosphere to usable oxygen, a key capability for supporting broader exploration.

“Liquid oxygen is an excellent rocket propellant for the return trip on eventual human missions,” explained Jeff Sheehy, chief engineer at NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate.

admin

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *