NASA's rover, Perseverance successfully entered the Martian atmosphere and landed safely on the floor of a vast crater. The rover's assignment, search for traces of ancient microbial life on the Red Planet.
This rover sailed through space for nearly seven months, covering 293 million miles before piercing the Martian atmosphere at 12,000 miles per hour to start its approach to land on the planet's surface.
With this mission, scientists hope to find biosignatures embedded in samples of ancient sediments. Perseverance is designed to extract from Martian rock for future analysis back on Earth–the first specimens ever collected by humans from another planet. Also, Perseverance is described as the most ambitious of nearly 20 U.S missions to Mars dating back to the Mariner spacecraft's 1965 fly-by.
Larger and filled with more instruments than the four Mars rovers, Perseverance is set to continue the findings that liquid water once flowed on the Martian surface and that carbon and other minerals altered by water and considered precursors to the evolution of life exist in the past.
Its payload includes demonstration projects that could help pave the way for human exploration of Mars, including a device to convert the carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere into pure oxygen.
Perseverance's predecessor, Curiosity, landed in 2012 and remains in operation, as does the stationary lander InSight, which arrived in 2018 to study the deep interior of Mars.
This is indeed one great achievement and we hope the mission to find microbial life on the surface of the planet could provide a wider perspective about how life originated.
References and Sources:
[1] Gorman, S. (2021, February 18). NASA's astrobiology rover Perseverance MAKES historic Mars landing. https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-space-exploration-mars-idUKKBN2AI1CM.
[2] Ackerman, E. IEEE Spectrum: Technology, Engineering, and Science News. https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/aerospace/robotic-exploration/nasa-perseverance-rover-landing-on-mars-overview.
Image: NASA/JPL (Science instruments on board the Perseverance rover.)