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NASA’s next Mars rover’s long journey into deep space is almost over.
The size of the car Perseverance rover, which launched on July 30 of last year, is expected to land in the 45-kilometer-wide Jezero Crater on February 18.
“I am delighted to be here today as our countdown to Mars goes from a few months to a few weeks,” Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Sciences Division, said at a conference. press Wednesday January 27. “Perseverance is drawing closer to the red planet and our team is preparing for it to land Crater lake. “
In photos: NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover mission to the Red Planet
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Perseverance is the centerpiece of NASA’s $ 2.7 billion Mars 2020 mission, which will open new horizons in the exploration of the Red Planet. For example, the rover will search for evidence of old Life on Mars on the land of Jezero, which was home to a lake and a river delta billions of years ago. No Red Planet robot has done such a job (although NASA’s Viking twin landers, which landed in 1976, looked for signs of existing organisms).
It will likely be difficult for Perseverance to make a definitive detection of old life, if it actually existed, mission team members said. But another pioneering aspect of the rover’s mission could enable this long-awaited breakthrough, if Perseverance’s on-site observations alone are not enough.
Perseverance will initiate humanity’s very first Mars sample return effort. The robot will collect and cache several dozen samples, which a joint NASA-European Space Agency campaign transport on Earth from 2031.
This pristine material from Mars will be studied by scientists here for decades to come, just as researchers still look at Apollo’s moon rocks today, 50 years after they were collected, Glaze said. And astrobiological investigations will undoubtedly be a priority for the teams that get their hands on the rock and dirt collected by Perseverance.
“Samples from Mars have the potential to profoundly change our understanding of the origin, evolution and distribution of life on Earth and elsewhere in the solar system,” Glaze said.
March 2020 is also designed to pave the way for future bold exploration efforts. For example, a small helicopter named Ingenuity journey to the red planet on the belly of Perseverance. Shortly after landing, Ingenuity will surrender and perform a few short test flights, the first ever by a rotorcraft on a world beyond Earth. If Ingenuity works well, helicopters could start plying the Martian skies in the near future, serving as scouts for rovers and / or collecting data themselves, NASA officials said.
Perseverance also carries an instrument called MOXIE (short for “Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment”), which will generate oxygen from the thin Martian atmosphere dominated by carbon dioxide. Such technology, when scaled up, could help humanity move to the Red Planet, mission team members said.
Perseverance can’t do any of these jobs, of course, unless you land safely on February 18. The rover will descend using the same dramatic “sky crane” strategy employed by its predecessor, the Curiosity rover, in August 2012. And March 2020 will benefit from some advancements over Curiosity in this regard – in particular, “range trigger” and “terrain relative navigation” technology, which allow Perseverance to arise more precisely that Curiosity did.
But, at 2260 pounds. (1,025 kilograms), Perseverance is a bit heavier than Curiosity – heavier, in fact, than any payload ever to land on Mars. And Jezero is bristling with dangers such as cliffs and rocks.
“I don’t think I am exaggerating when I say that entering, descending and landing is the most critical and dangerous part of a mission,” Allen Chen, head of entry, March 2020 descent and landing at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said at Wednesday’s press conference.
“Success is never guaranteed,” Chen said. “And that’s especially true when we’re trying to land the biggest, heaviest, and most complicated rover we’ve ever built at the most dangerous site we’ve ever attempted to land.”
So, think of happy thoughts for perseverance on February 18th. Or start thinking about it now; It couldn’t hurt, and the big day is only three weeks away.
Mike Wall is the author of “Over there“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book on the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
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