NASA’s newest Mars Perseverance rover presented an astrobiology project on Thursday to look for symptoms of ancient microbial life and to fly a helicopter-drone to the world for the first time.
An Atlas V rocket from the United Launch Alliance took off as planned at 0750 (1150 GMT) in Cape Canaveral, Florida, despite a 4.2 magnitude earthquake that shook NASA’s jet propulsion lab in California, which ran the project minutes earlier.
The first level of separation took position a few minutes later and Perserverance set out for a moment to burn to put it on a trajectory to Mars.
If all goes according to plan, Perseverance will succeed on the Red Planet on February 18, 2021, allowing the fifth rover to be installed since 1997.
Until now, they were all Americans. China unveiled its first rover on Mars last week, which is expected to arrive until May 2021.
Next year, Mars may have only 3 active rovers, adding NASA’s Curiosity, which has traveled 23 kilometers (14 miles) from the red planet since it landed in 2012.
The launch also took a stand despite the coronavirus pandemic, which hit the United States harder than any other country.
NASA leader Jim Bridenstine said it was even more evident that the launch was going a long way.
“We’re used to doing amazing things in the toughest times, and it’s no different,” he said minutes before takeoff.
Perseverance is a step forward from curiosity.
It’s faster, with a more powerful six-wheel set, more computation force and can navigate autonomously two hundred meters steadily.
About the size of a small SUV, it weighs a metric ton, has 19 cameras and two microphones, which scientists hope will be the first to record sound on Mars.
It has a two-metre-long robotic arm and is powered through a small nuclear battery.
Once on the surface, NASA will deploy the Ingenuity Mars helicopter, a 1.8 kilogram (four-pound) aircraft that will attempt to fly in an environment that is one% of Earth’s density.
The concept is to present evidence of the concept that may one day revolutionize planetary exploration, as rovers can only travel a few dozen kilometers in their lifetime and are vulnerable to sand dunes and other obstacles of more than 40 centimeters (15 inches).
Perseverance’s main project is the planet in search of evidence of ancient life forms.
Scientists say that more than 3 billion years ago the planet was much warmer than it is today and was covered with rivers and lakes, situations that may have led to an undeniable microbial life.
The reasons why the bloodless, sterile world we know today is not fully known.
Another novelty: perseverance drilling will gather thirty intact rock cores and place them in control tubes, which will be collected through a joint long-term US and European mission.
The undisputed evidence of life that happened on Mars will be confirmed, if it exists, until those samples are analyzed in the next decade, NASA Chief Scientist Thomas Zurbuchen said Tuesday.
Primitive life
“What we are in favor of is probably a very primitive life, we are not in favor of the bureaucracy of complex life that can simply be things like bones or fern fossils,” explained assignment scientist Ken Farley.
NASA chose the Jezero crater as its landing site, a giant that has an effect on the basin north of the Martian equator.
Between 3 and 4 billion years ago, a river flowed into a water frame.
Scientists claim that the ancient river delta may have collected and preserved biological molecules and other possible symptoms of microbial life.
If situations are harsh on the sand-swept planet where nighttime temperatures drop to minus 90 degrees Celsius (minus 130 Fahrenheit), this has a main advantage: no tectonic plate activity. On Earth, it is incredibly complicated for landscapes that have remained the same for 3 billion years.
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More than 350 geologists, geochemists, astrobiologists, atmospheric scientists and other scientists from around the world are on the mission.
It lasted at least two years, but probably much more given the staying power of previous scout vehicles.
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