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NASA’s new Mars car will land on the Red Planet in less than 100 days.
The hunt for life Rover Perseverance March 2020, which launched on July 30, is expected to land in the 45 km-wide Jezero crater on the afternoon of February 18, 2021, just 99 days from today (November 11).
The home section will be busy for handlers of the car-sized robot.
Related: Photos of NASA’s Perseverance Mars 2020 rover mission
“While we call the six and a half month journey from Earth to Mars, I assure you there is not much croquet in the lido bridge, “mission project leader John McNamee, from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California said in a press release.
“Between checking the spacecraft and planning and simulating our landing and surface operations, the entire team is on time, working on our exploration of Jezero crater,” said McNamee.
Perseverance – the centerpiece of NASA’s $ 2.7 billion Mars 2020 mission – will use the landing strategy pioneered by its predecessor, the Curiosity rover: A rocket-powered Celestial Crane will lower Jezero’s Ground Perseverance on cables, then fly off to land at a safe distance.
Perseverance will use its suite of advanced instruments to search for signs of ancient life on Mars in Jezero, which was home to a lake and a river delta billions of years ago. The rover will also collect and cache samples for a future return to Earth and demonstrate technologies that could facilitate future exploration of the Red Planet.
For example, one of the Perseverance instruments, called MOXIE (short for “Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment”), will generate oxygen from the thin Martian atmosphere dominated by carbon dioxide. A larger scale version of MOXIE could help humanity gain a foothold on the red planetNASA officials said. (The agency plans to launch its first crewed Mars missions in the 2030s.)
And a tiny helicopter named Ingenuity fly to Mars on the belly of Perseverance. Once the rover lands and finds a good spot for the helicopter to perform test flights, Ingenuity will break away and make a few short forays into the Martian skies – the very first flights of a rotorcraft over a world at – beyond Earth. If Ingenuity is successful, future missions to Mars could use helicopters to collect data in hard-to-reach places and serve as scouting for rovers, Ingenuity team members said.
Two more Mars missions are also expected to arrive on the Red Planet in February 2021 – Hope, a meteorological study orbiter operated by the United Arab Emirates Space Agency, and China’s Tianwen-1 Mission. Tianwen-1 consists of an orbiter and a lander-rover duo; the surface vehicle is expected to land a few months after the mission is put into orbit around Mars.
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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