“Perseverance” successfully arrived on the surface of Mars on the evening of February 18, 2021. The rover is now supposed to look for possible traces of former life forms in the remains of an ancient river delta. Perseverance will also collect rock samples there that will later be returned to Earth by follow-up missions. Another planned highlight of the Mars 2020 mission: a helicopter drone will soar into the thin Martian atmosphere for exploratory flights.
So far everything has worked out: Perseverancen is now at its destination – in the Jezero crater on the Red Planet. “It was difficult that the entire landing had to be fully automated,” explains Nicole Schmitz from the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The control center at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California received the status signals with a delay of around eleven minutes and was therefore unable to intervene in the landing process. But everything went according to plan and Perseverance also transmitted the first snapshots from the landing site.
Landing in a promising place
Now the first explorations of the area should take place. With the Mastcam-Z 3D camera, it is possible to develop a full-color 360-degree panorama. With maximum zoom, the device can make objects the size of a housefly visible over the length of a football field, reports the DLR.
“Over the course of the first few weeks, this will give us a glimpse of a very special landscape: sediments in a former, ancient crater lake on Mars with a well-preserved river delta, in whose fine-grained deposits there might be traces of past simple life”, says Nicole Schmitz. Geological features show that until about 3.5 billion years ago there was still liquid water on the surface of our neighboring planet and thus potentially life-friendly operations. In the course of time, however, this treasure largely escaped. The first unicellular organisms arose on Earth when Mars was still humid and warm. The question therefore arises whether this development could also have taken place on our neighboring planet back then. You should pursue Perseverance.
Drone flight and home delivery of samples
As the scientists explain, the landing site is an ideal place for this. They assume that there was a lake in the 45-kilometer-wide Jezero crater more than 3.5 billion years ago, in which tributaries left a river delta of deposited sediments. It is known from the earth that indications of life are particularly well preserved in the subsurface due to the comparatively rapid deposition in delta structures. In order to collect information about the conditions at the landing site and possible traces of life in the ancient delta, Perseverance is equipped with seven groups of scientific instruments.
In addition, for the first time in the history of the exploration of Mars, the rover will fill 38 containers with drill cores from a depth of up to 20 centimeters, which will then be stored in a suitable location for later return to Earth. Two future missions jointly planned by NASA and ESA will bring the pencil-sized samples back to earth in the early 2030s. There they can then be analyzed by complex devices that would be far too large and complex to be sent to the Red Planet.
Another novelty of the mission will be the use of the “Ingenuity” helicopter drone: For the first time in the history of space travel, an aircraft will rise from the ground of another planet into the atmosphere. The Martian conditions presented a major challenge when planning the small helicopter: In order to be able to take off in the thin air, Ingenuity had to be extremely light and at the same time equipped with very large, rapidly rotating rotor blades. The developers finally came to a mass of 1.8 kilograms and a wingspan of 120 centimeters. Ingenuity is said to fly over the landing area several times. A mini camera will deliver images from a height of 10 to 15 meters.
It is now to be hoped that all the ambitious projects within the framework of NASA’s fifth rover mission to Mars will succeed. Perseverance could then serve the exploration of our mysterious neighboring planet for at least one Mars year (two Earth years).
Info video about the mission. (Credit: © NASA / DLR)
Source: German Aerospace Center