(CNN) – When NASA’s Perseverance rover lands on Mars in February 2021, the project will spend the next two years exploring one of the oldest and most intriguing sites on the red planet: the heebel crater.
It is the site of an ancient lake bed and a delta of a river that existed between 3 and 4 billion years ago, when Mars was warmer, wetter and more livable for future life.
Perseverance is NASA’s first genuine astrobiology project and the rover will look for symptoms of ancient microbial life. The rover will not only explore the new clinical instruments, cameras and microphones of the heero crater, but will also collect the first samples to be sent from Mars to Earth through long-term planned projects.
The mars Sample Return project’s confusing adventure stems from NASA’s collaboration with the European Space Agency and foreign partners. And given the difficulty of this adventure back to the sample threads, they won’t land on Earth until 2031, at the earliest.
“Persistence is the first step in the first round trip project to some other planet in our solar system,” Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division at NASA’s Washington headquarters, said at a press conference. “Scientists sought a pattern of Mars to examine for generations. Now we’re about to start looking for this feat.”
Unlike Earth, Mars does not have a “young surface” because it is not active in the same way as our planet with moving tectonic plates, volcanic eruptions and other things that tend to erase history on the earth’s surface. Therefore, when Perseverance travels through Jezero’s crater, he will practice and model the well-preserved beyond Mars.
Scientists estimate that the water that was filled has an effect on the crater to shape a lake about 3.8 billion years ago, just as life began on Earth, according to Briony Horgan, a member of perseverance’s scientific team and associate professor of planetary science at Purdue University. The lake was part of the length of Lake Ontario (which is 53 miles wide and an average intensity of 283 feet) and is almost as deep.
The river delta, which resembles the Mississippi River Delta, once led to the lake and the lake has persisted for a long time. In the other aspect of the lake bed, you can see a river channel where water is swept away by the crater.
The delta is the ultimate intriguing domain to explore through Perseverance because it preserves the back of the lake: mud, biological matter, the symptoms of ancient life, and potentially even microbe fossils can be preserved at the back of the delta, Horgan said.
Based on photographs provided through the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which was introduced in 2005, scientists already know that there are attractive minerals around the crater edge called carbonates. On Earth, carbonates maintain fossils of ancient life. These carbonates mark what scientists must be an ancient shore of the lake. When the water rushed here, it may have only helped fossilize life or biological molecules by meaning it in the form of carbonates.
First, Perseverance will explore the river delta, follow it across the crater’s edge, and finally ,”hunt from the crater and explore the wonderland of the first history of Mars,” according to Benjamin Weiss, a professor of planetary sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. and one of the scientists in the pattern supports perseverance. Weiss is part of a team that will determine where and when to collect patterns, and hopes to analyze them once they return to Earth.
Perseverance has a complicated formula for collecting samples, caching them, and storing them on the Martian surface. And to do so, his apparatus had to be meticulously cleaned up on Earth to detect any possible contamination of the Martian site through Earth’s microbes, or provide a false positive for a possible life on Mars.
“This is the cleanest formula we’ve released,” said Matt Wallace, Assistant Perseverance Project Manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “The clinical network is for lines of signatures billions of years ago. We don’t need to confuse this investigation.”
While Perseverance has the ability to fill 43 pattern tubes in its two-year exploration of the 28-mile-wide crater and surrounding area, there will be room for only 31 of the pipes to return to Earth.
The clinical team, which includes a lot of people, will have to paint in combination to find out when and where to take patterns. The difference in the number of patterns the rover can collect compared to those that will recede gives scientists some leeway if they give up a pattern for a larger one.
But once full, the tubes are emptied.
“The key to this project will be to identify samples so compelling that we can’t leave them, so it’s imperative that projects pass and get them,” Weiss said. “We chose them for humanity, so we have to make sure they’re the most exciting.”
Scientists will look for patterns or textures in the rocks that act as life records, on some of the oldest known rocks on Earth in Western Australia, 3.48 billion years ago.
Perseverance’s clinical team visited and studied these rocks to prepare for the mission. For example, microbes at the back of a water frame shape a film that creates a different layer between water and mud.
Over time, those forms of stratified rocks called stromatolites.
“The most productive position to seek life is a position you think life may have existed,” said Ken Farley, a perseverance project scientist at the California Institute of Technology. “The current surface of Mars is too bloody and too dry for any life we know is about to exist. Billions of years ago, it was much warmer with water on the surface. The rocks deposited at the time were in habitable environments and recorded them.
Lunar samples sent back to Earth through the Apollo missions have replaced our understanding of the moon for more than 50 years, adding how it was able to form.
Weiss worked in studies that used samples collected during the last years of the Apollo program. Some remained sealed for 50 years until new technologies and tools were developed to help perceive them better.
Weiss needs the same for Mars samples.
“We can’t get caught by conforming to patterns based solely on what existing tools can measure,” Weiss said. “We can’t believe what the tools will look like in a hundred years. But if we place patterns that can be habitable, they will make them attractive in the coming years.
Collecting samples on the surface of Mars is the first step.
“It’s a very important concept to bring them back,” Glaze said. “This will require several steps and several releases.”
Although the timeline is elongated, compared to the overall speed of launch missions to Mars for seven-month voyages when aligned with Earth in the same aspect of the sun, those launches aim to identify the correct orbits, arrival times, and departures. From Mars. based on time and even seasons.
In 2026, NASA and ESA will launch the Mars Ascent Vehicle engine and rocket with the Sample Fetch Rover. Perseverance will witness a percentage of photographs of the spacecraft’s landing on Mars when it happened in 2028, a first time.
The lander will launch the search vehicle to the Martian surface. This small rover, similar to previous NASA rovers, will collect samples and take them back to the lander. Perseverance may also be able to deliver the samples on its own.
The exploration vehicle will have to paint temporarily for 8 months in the Martian spring and summer before winter dust masks the atmosphere. This lightweight “Martian dune buggy” w8 will be designed to temporarily achieve its goals, said David Parker, director of human exploration and robotics at the European Space Agency.
Samples will be transferred to the ascent vehicle and taken off from the surface of Mars, first of which will witness perseverance.
The ascent vehicle will encounter an ESA spacecraft orbiting Mars and fire a container the length of a football containing the samples. The ESA orbiter will capture the container as it passes between spacecraft and returns to Earth.
Near Earth, a NASA payload in the orbiter will place the pattern container in an access that can be deployed from the orbiter and place the patterns on Earth in 2031.
Samples will land in Utah and be transported to a facility related to the management of biological threats.
Scientists around the world will then be able to examine and analyze the chemical and physical homes of these rock and soil samples from Mars, looking for symptoms beyond life.
“This is the manifestation of the dreams and aspirations of many scientists,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Scientific Missions Directorate. “The samples of Mars have the possibility to profoundly replace our lives.”
Guest reviews