Perseverance rover marks 1 Martian year on Red Planet
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover completes its main mission to the Red Planet.
The car format Perseverance robber landed at the bottom of the Jezero crater on Mars on Feb. 18, 2021, kicking off an ambitious surface mission designed to last one year on the Red Planet, which equates to about 687 Earth days.
That time is now over; the Mars calendar flipped for Perseverance on Friday (January 6). But don’t worry: The six-wheeled robot will transition seamlessly into an extended mission on Saturday (January 7).
Related: 12 amazing photos from the first Earth year of the Perseverance rover on Mars
Perseverance has two main tasks on the Red Planet. The rover is looking for possible signs of Mars life at the bottom of the 45 kilometer wide Jezero, which billions of years ago harbored a large lake and a river delta. Perseverance is also about collecting and caching dozens of samples, which a joint campaign by NASA and European Space Agency (ESA) will bring to earth for detailed study in the early 2030s, if all goes according to plan.
That campaign will launch a rocket-carrying NASA lander in mid-to-late 2020, as well as an ESA Earth return orbiter to the Red Planet. The plan calls for Perseverance to drive his monsters to the lander; the rocket will then launch the precious payload to Mars orbit, where the ESA probe will snag it and drag the material back to Earth.
Perseverance has made a lot of progress in sampling so far. The rover is already filled and sealed 18 of 38 titanium sampling tubes (opens in new tab) as well as three of the five “witness tubes”, which will help members of the mission team assess the cleanliness of Perseverance’s sampling system.
And the rover has also started to cache samples, until now four of the planned 10 tubes on a piece of Jezero’s floor that the mission team calls Three Forks. This depot is a backup, to cover the possibility that Perseverance will not be able to transport its samples to the lander when the time comes. (The rover is in good shape now, but there’s no guarantee its health will last through the end of the decade.)
In that case, two small helicopters that will launch aboard the lander will take the sample tubes out of the depot one by one.
With this hedge in mind, the mission team collected two samples from each of the target rocks. Perseverance is keeping one set on board and caching the other set.
The pick-up helicopters will be used heavily Resourcefulnessthe 4-pound (1.8-kilogram) helicopter that traveled to Mars with Perseverance.
Ingenuity’s main task was to show that aerial exploration is possible on Mars despite that of the planet thin atmosphere, which is only 1% as dense as Earth’s at sea level. The small helicopter quickly achieved that goal during a five-flight demonstration campaign and now serves as a reconnaissance for Perseverance on an ambitious, expanded mission.
Ingenuity now has 37 flights under its belt, covering a total of 7.6 kilometers. Perseverance, on its part, has driven nearly 9 miles off-Earth, and that total will rise significantly during its extended mission.
After it finishes dropping monsters at the Three Forks depot, Perseverance will head to the top of the old river delta of Jezero, where it will likely finish the climb in February. The rover will then spend about eight months exploring the region, including looking for rocks washed into the crater by the ancient river of Jezero.
“The Delta Top campaign is our chance to glimpse the geological process beyond the walls of Jezero Crater,” said deputy project scientist Katie Stack Morgan of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. statement last month (opens in new tab).
“Billions of years ago, a raging river carried rubble and boulders from miles outside the walls of Jezero,” she said. “We’re going to examine these ancient river deposits and sample their long-traveled boulders and rocks.”
Mike Wall is the author of “Outside (opens in new tab)(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in new tab). follow us on twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or on Facebook (opens in new tab).
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