NASA’s newest Mars exploration vehicle, Perseverance, embarks on 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.
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.
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.
“It’s a challenge. There’s no other way to put it,” SAID NASA leader Jim Bridenstine on Wednesday before launch.
“That said, we know how to land on Mars, we’ve already done it 8 times. This will be the ninth,” he added, referring to the total of past rover and landing missions.
Perseverance, which was developed at the legendary Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, is an advanced edition of 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 expect to be the first to record sound on Mars.
It has a two-metre-long robotic arm and is fed through a small nuclear generator.
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 –
“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.
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), it has a main advantage: there is no tectonic plate activity. On Earth, it is incredibly complicated for landscapes that have remained the same for 3 billion years.
“Mars retains an incredibly complex geology on the surface,” said Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Sciences Division.
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.