After a seven-month journey, NASA’s Perseverance rover prepares for a downturn on Mars Thursday after negotiating a dangerous landing approach that marks the beginning of its multi-year study for signs of ancient microbial life.
The Mars 2020 mission, which departed late from Florida in late July, involves the largest vehicle ever sent to the Red Planet.
Built at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, it weighs a ton, has an artificial arm that is seven feet (two meters) long, with 19 cameras, and two microphones to record the Martian landscape.
If it reaches full, Perseverance will only be the fifth rover to successfully complete the journey from Pathfinder in 1997. They have all been American and the last one, Curiosity, is still active.
China last week launched its Tianwen-1 spacecraft in orbit around Mars carrying both a lander and a rover, which is expected to land in May.
At around 3:55 pm EST (2:25 am IST) on Thursday, the durability of its six-wheeler will land on a landing site described as “amazing” by NASA scientist Ken Farley.
Jezero Crater, a 28-mile-wide (45-kilometer-wide) basin in the northern Martian hemisphere, was considered for previous missions, but was considered too difficult to get to. seo.
Because of COVID-19 pandemics, there will be fewer people than usual in the mission control room.
“But assuming we have proof of landing, I don’t think COVID can stop us from jumping up and down and pumping our fists,” Matt said. Wallace, the mission’s deputy project manager.
The first low-resolution images of the surface come quickly. Video footage is expected, including an entry into the atmosphere later.
Lakes and rivers
Scientists believe that, about 3.5 billion years ago, the crater was home to a river that flowed into a lake, depositing sediment in a fan-shaped delta.
During this time, “Mars was very similar to Earth in a number of important ways,” Farley said.
“There was a strong feeling, there were lakes and rivers on its surface, and there were arable environments, places where organisms we know on earth today could thrive.”
Mars is the only known place where such a situation arose outside our planet.
Mars 2020 is the first mission with the specific goal of finding evidence that life once existed.
Over a number of years, persistence collects and stores up to 30 rock and earth samples that are eventually returned to Earth where they are studied by labs.
Its top speed is 152 meters per hour (about 0.1 miles per hour) – slow by Earth standards but faster than any before, as it crosses the delta first, then old the shore of the lake, and finally the edges of the pit.
The rover could return the samples as part of a planned joint mission between NASA and the European Space Agency in the 2030s.
“The scientists who study these samples in school today may not even be born yet,” Farley said.
Making oxygen
What would these long-awaited life signs look like? “We shouldn’t be looking for fossil teeth or fossil bones or fossil leaves,” he said.
Instead, it hunts down organic molecules and other signs of past microbial life, a discovery that would be “elegant.”
But the first months of the mission will not be devoted to this main goal. Parallel tests are also being designed.
NASA in particular wants to fly, for the first time, a powered aircraft on another planet. The helicopter, called Ingenuity, must be able to take off in the atmosphere of just one percent of the Earth’s density.
Another goal is to help pave the way for future human missions, by developing a system that can convert oxygen from a carbon dioxide atmosphere to a large, plant-like atmosphere.
The space agency uses an instrument called the In-Situ Mars Oxygen Utilization Test (MOXIE), which uses a process called electrolysis to produce about 10 grams of oxygen per hour.
NASA spends approximately $ 2.4 billion (approximately Rs. 17,430 crores) on Mars 2020 million. Landing and operating the rover costs approximately $ 300 million (approximately Rs. 2,180 crores).
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