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The landing of NASA’s next Mars rover is less than a month away.
The car-sized Perseverance rover, the heart of NASA’s $ 2.7 billion Mission March 2020, will land on February 18, marking the start of a new era of exploration of the Red Planet.
On this fateful day, a rocket-powered celestial crane will lower perseverance to the ground 45 kilometers wide. Crater lake, which was home to a lake and a river delta billions of years ago. During its mission, Perseverance will roam Jezero looking for signs of ancient life on Mars and collect and cache dozens of samples.
In photos: NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover mission to the Red Planet
If all goes according to plan, these samples will be transported to Earth as early as 2031 by a joint NASA-European Space Agency campaign, as part of humanity’s first-ever effort to return samples to Mars.
March 2020 is historic in other ways as well. NASA has not actively looked for signs of Life on Mars since the twin Viking missions, launched in the mid-1970s. (The predecessor of perseverance, the still productive Curiosity rover, assesses the past habitability of Mars but is not equipped to research life itself.) And traveling to the red planet on the belly of Perseverance is a small helicopter named Ingenuity, which will attempt to become the first rotorcraft to fly over a world beyond Earth.
Perseverance is also designed to help pave the way for human exploration of Mars. For example, one of the rover’s instruments, called MOXIE (short for “Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment”), will generate oxygen from the Martian atmosphere dominated by carbon dioxide – a technology which, if it was scaling, could help our species gain a foothold on the Red Planet, NASA officials said. (ISRU, in turn, stands for “in situ resource use,” a sophisticated term for living off the land.)
So there’s a lot to look forward to after Perseverance hits the red dirt. And the NASA rover isn’t the only spacecraft to arrive on Mars next month. The UAE’s first Red Planet mission, an orbiter named Hope, will reach Mars on February 9, if all goes according to plan. This step will be followed a day later by the arrival of Tianwen-1, The first all-local Red Planet effort in China.
Tianwen-1 consists of an orbiter and a pair of lander-rover. The orbiter will spend several months imagining the designated landing site to prepare for the landing, which is expected to take place in May, Chinese space officials have said.
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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