NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover is completing its major mission on Mars.
passenger car size patience rover It landed on the floor of Jezero crater on Mars on February 18, 2021, beginning an ambitious surface mission designed to last one Martian year (about 687 days on Earth).
That time is over.of Mars The calendar changed to Perseverance on Friday (January 6th). But don’t worry. The six-wheeled robot seamlessly transitions to an extended mission on Saturday (January 7th).
Related: 12 stunning photos from the Perseverance rover’s first Earth year on Mars
Perseverance has two main tasks on Mars.Rover looking for possible signs Mars life On the 28-mile-wide (45-kilometer) floor of Jezero, where billions of years ago there was a great lake-river delta. Perseverance also collects and caches dozens of samples from a joint NASA-European Space Agency (ESA) campaign. bring to earth If all goes according to plan, a detailed study will take place in the early 2030s.
The campaign will launch a rocket-powered NASA Lander and ESA Earth Return Orbiter to Mars in the mid-to-late 2020s. The plan is for Perseverance to bring the sample to the lander. The rocket then launches the valuable cargo into Mars orbit, where the ESA rover hooks it up and carries it back to Earth.
Perseverance has made many strides at the forefront of sampling over the years.The rover is already full and sealed 18 of 38 titanium sampling tubes (opens in new tab) Three of five “witness tubes” to help mission team members assess the cleanliness of Perseverance’s sampling system.
Rover has also started caching samples, which are dropping to date. 4 of the 10 planned tubes In Jezero’s floor patch, which the mission team calls Three Forks. This depot is a backup, covering the possibility that Perseverance will not be able to bring its samples to the lander when the time comes. (Rover is currently in good health, but there is no guarantee that that health will continue until the end of her decade.)
In that case, two small helicopters aboard the lander will be launched to retrieve one sample tube from the depot.
With this barrier in mind, the mission team has collected two samples from each of the rocks of interest. Patience is keeping one set onboard and he caching one more.
fetch helicopter Originality and ingenuitya 4-pound (1.8-kilogram) chopper, traveled to Mars with perseverance.
Ingenuity’s main task was to show that aerial exploration on Mars is possible, even though Mars is Mars. thin atmosphere, which is only 1% of the Earth’s density at sea level. This small rotorcraft quickly achieved that goal with five flight demonstrations during his campaign and is now serving as a scout for his Perseverance on an ambitious extended mission.
Ingenuity currently has 37 flights covering a total of 4.7 miles (7.6 km). Perseverance has recorded about 8.7 miles (14.0 km) of extraterrestrial mileage, and that total will increase considerably during its long mission.
After dropping samples at the Three Forks Depot, Perseverance will head to the top of Jezero’s ancient river delta, possibly finishing in February. The rover will then spend the next eight months exploring the area, looking for rocks and other rocks that were flowed into the crater by Jezero’s ancient rivers.
“The Delta Top campaign is an opportunity to glimpse the geological processes beyond the walls of Jezero Crater,” said Katie Stack Morgan, Associate Project Scientist for Perseverance at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. says. remarks last month (opens in new tab).
“Billions of years ago, raging rivers carried debris and rocks from miles away,” she said. “We plan to study these ancient river sediments and obtain samples from megaliths and rocks that have long migrated.”
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