NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover is finishing up its prime mission on the Red Planet.
The car-sized Perseverance rover landed on the floor of Mars’ Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021, kicking off an ambitious surface mission created to last 1 Red Planet year, which is about 687 Earth days.
That time is actually up; the Mars calendar turned for Perseverance on Friday (Jan. 6). But don’t fret: On Saturday, the six-wheeled robot is going to transition seamlessly to an extended mission (Jan. 7).
On the Red Planet, perseverance has two significant tasks. The rover is hunting for possible signs of Mars life on the floor of the 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) Jezero, which had a large lake as well as a river delta billions of years ago. Perseverance will also collect as well as cache a huge selection of samples, which, if all goes as planned, a joint NASA and ESA campaign will bring to Earth early in the 2030s for comprehensive analysis.
The campaign is going to launch a rocket-toting NASA lander along with an ESA Earth-return orbiter to the Red Planet in the mid to late 2020s. The program calls for Perseverance to get its samples to the lander. After that the rocket is going to send the important cargo to Mars orbit, where the ESA probe will grab it and bring it back to Earth.
On the sampling front, tenacity has made a lot of progress. The rover has brimming as well as sealed eighteen of its 38 titanium sampling tubes (opens in a brand new tab), along with three of its five “witness tubes, that will help mission team members evaluate the cleanliness of Perseverance’s sampling process.
The rover has additionally begun caching samples, dropping four of a planned 10 tubes on a section of Jezero’s floor known as Three Forks. This particular depot functions as a backup in case Perseverance is not able to ferry its samples to the lander when the time comes. (The rover is in good condition right now, but there is no guarantee its health is going to hold through the end of the decade.)
In this situation, 2 little helicopters, which will release from the depot one at a time, will retrieve the sample tubes from the lander.
This particular hedge has prompted the mission team to obtain two samples from everyone of its target rocks. Perseverance signifies having a set on board and caching the other set.
The fetch helicopters is going to be based largely on Ingenuity, the 4 pound (1.8 kilograms) chopper that went to Mars with Perseverance.
The primary objective of Ingenuity was to demonstrate that in spite of the thin atmosphere of Mars, aerial exploration is feasible on the planet, which happens to be only 1 % as heavy as Earth’s at sea level. The little rotorcraft rapidly accomplished this during a five-flight demonstration campaign and it is currently serving on an ambitious extended mission as scout for Perseverance.
Ingenuity at present has thirty seven flights under its belt, encompassing an overall of 4.7 miles (7.6 kilometers). For its part, Perseverance has amassed almost 8.7 miles (14.0 km) of earth – based driving, and that number is going to climb substantially during its lengthy mission.
Right after dropping samples at Three Forks depot, Perseverance is likely to head for the top of the ancient river delta of Jezero, very likely to finish the climb in February. The rover is going to then take a look at the area for the next 8 weeks or so, searching for, along with other things, rocks which were flooded into the crater by Jezero’s ancient river.
“The Delta Top Campaign will be our chance to get a peek at the geological process outside of the walls of Jezero Crater,” Perseverance deputy project scientist Katie Stack Morgan, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a statement last month(opens in new tab).
“a roaring river dragged wreckage as well as rocks from far outside the walls of Jezero, billions of years ago,” she said. “We will investigate these ancient river deposits and also get samples from their long-traveled boulders as well as rocks,” she said.
