NASA’s Perseverance rover has landed on Mars, completing its seven-month journey to the Mars . The Mars 2020 mission will look for signs of ancient microbial life and collect rock samples which will be returned to Earth later within the decade. Perseverance’s arrival marks the top of a busy February for Mars exploration, with the United Arab Emirates and China successfully delivering Mars orbiters earlier this month.
At 20:55 GMT, mission control at the reaction propulsion Laboratory in California confirmed that the car-sized rover had touched down within the Jezero Crater – a treacherous landscape pockmarked with boulders and steep cliffs. The craft was autonomously guided to the bottom by the Terrain Relative Navigation system, which referenced live photos of the surface against a hazard map generated from Mars orbiters.
“What a tremendous day,” says Steve Jurczyk NASA’s acting administrator. “What a tremendous team, to figure through all the adversity and every one the challenges that accompany landing a rover on Mars plus the changes of Covid
The Jezero Crater, a 45-kilometre-wide basin, was selected due to its potential for holding signs of past life. Geologists believe that around 3.5 billion years ago a river during this region flowed into an outsized body of water, forming a river delta. This a part of the Martian surface also shows signs of volcanic and hydrothermal activity – processes that likely played a task in how life emerged on Earth.
This watery region dried out once Mars’ geomagnetic field died away early in its history, leaving the Martian surface exposed to the solar radiation . But what astronomers want to understand is whether or not primitive organisms existed on our planetary neighbour before it became the tough barren world we see today.
“We all have this curiosity about whether or not we are alone, or if there's a possible for all times to possess existed elsewhere . having the ability to seek out evidence of that might be amazing,” says Kelsey Moore, a geobiologist at NASA’s reaction propulsion Laboratory.
In a perfect world, astronomers would find an actual fossil of a bacterial cell or a microbial mat – the sort of patchy green substance found covering rocks on Earth. But they are more likely to possess to form do with chemical clues for all times obtained by the rover’s SHERLOC instrument. Scanning the Martian surface with a laser, it'll look for organic compounds and build a surface map of rock mineralogies.
Hunting for life: Science instruments on the Perseverance rover.
Perseverance also carries a subsurface radar system and 19 cameras. Guided by this imaging array, the rover will collect over 30 rock cores employing a drill attached to a robotic arm. These samples will eventually be returned to Earth as a part of the NASA/ESA Mars Sample Return campaign, which could launch as soon as 2026.
“If we see something that's really fascinating, we’ll take a pencil-like core, seal it up and place it next to the rover,” says Luther Beegle, SHERLOC’s PI . “The next rover will pick it up and convey it back to Earth where we’ll be ready to search for evidence of life in terrestrial laboratories.”
In a perfect world, astronomers would find an actual fossil of a bacterial cell or a microbial mat – the sort of patchy green substance found covering rocks on Earth. But they're more likely to possess to form do with chemical clues for all times obtained by the rover’s SHERLOC instrument. Scanning the Martian surface with a laser, it'll look for organic compounds and build a surface map of rock mineralogies.
Perseverance also carries a subsurface radar system and 19 cameras. Guided by this imaging array, the rover will collect over 30 rock cores employing a drill attached to a robotic arm. These samples will eventually be returned to Earth as a part of the NASA/ESA Mars Sample Return campaign, which could launch as soon as 2026.
“If we see something that's really fascinating, we’ll take a pencil-like core, seal it up and place it next to the rover,” says Luther Beegle, SHERLOC’s PI . “The next rover will pick it up and convey it back to Earth where we’ll be ready to search for evidence of life in terrestrial laboratories.”
Paving the way for humans
The initial science mission will last one Mars year (about 687 Earth days), though Beegle hopes it can continue doing valuable science for for much longer , a bit like the Curiosity rover which remains operational 10 years since it landed.
The Mars 2020 mission also carried the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, a 1.8 kg experimental device which may enable future Mars exploration to incorporate an aerial dimension. Ingenuity will attempt up to 5 test flights within a 30-Martian-day (31-Earth-day) demonstration Windows.
Searching for signs of past life on Mars with NASA’s Perseverance rover
Another aspect of the mission is to pave the way for human exploration. Perseverance carries materials that would be utilized in spacesuits to ascertain how they cope within the Martian climate. Its MOXIE instrument, meanwhile, will produce oxygen from Mars’ carbon-dioxide atmosphere, demonstrating how that future explorers might produce oxygen for rocket fuel also as for breathing.