How will Perseverance unlock Mars?
After the successful landing of the Perseverance rover, which launched on the 30th July 2020 from CCAFS Space Launch Complex 41, NASA are now one step ahead to answer the question:
“Is there life on Mars?”.
In this article, we will delve into what this project is and how it will help with possible future projects. The project was an extremely expensive investment, costing NASA around $2.4 billion to launch.
The Rover landed in the Jezero crater, which was once was a lake. The crater is the perfect place for microbial life to have inhabited. So, the Jezero Crater would be the ideal places to find traces of these life forms.
The main focus of the creation of perseverance was for those at NASA to study the surface of Mars and to find samples of ancient soil which can be examined for biosignatures of microbial life forms, meaning that they are searching for traces of small life forms in the soil.
The Rover will collect these soil samples by drilling into the ground, and then storing these samples in small tubes. The Rover will scatter these tubes on the surface to be later collected in two more future missions, later sending them back to earth so that they can be analysed by astrobiologists.
The landing of Perseverance was a very difficult task at hand involving many problems that those at JPL had to face.
Perseverance set its course to Mars last year, travelling through space for a planned 7 months. On the 18th of February, the shuttle began the EDL sequence, more commonly known as entry, descent and landing. This is the final stage of the journey and the most crucial part, because everything could go terribly wrong.
When an object enters the atmosphere, it warms up due to the immense force of air resistance, which is the same force that falling divers are subject to, but not as large. The shuttle is adapted to be protected against this air resistance due to the presence of a heat shield, which prevents the shuttle from burning.
When entering the atmosphere, the speed at which the rover shuttle was travelling at was so fast there had to be a mechanism to decrease its rate of movement. Those at NASA created a sonic parachute that would decrease the shuttle’s speed to 200 m/s, much slower than the 12,100 m/s which it had entered the atmosphere at. JPL, jet propulsion labs, also designed a jetpack that would help decrease that speed to an even further degree.
The rover itself descended on metal ropes and the jetpack would then fly as far away until it runs out of power, floating into the oblivion of space, so that it would not crash into the rover and sabotage the mission.
Perseverance is not only a rover, but it has a drone that will be activated, called Ingenuity.
The technological advances in this drone are groundbreaking.
It includes a computer, navigator and two cameras that allow scientists to see what Ingenuity is able to see on Mars.
The next two missions after Perseverance will help the collection of tubes containing soil from Mars that can then be analysed by Astro biologists, and therefore help scientists understand what microbial life could have lived on Mars, and finally would help us answer the question about possible developed life on this planet.There is still a lot ahead for everyone at NASA, and this is only the first step of a greater development by all the scientists and engineers working on future missions, ultimately leading to ambitious projects to colonise Mars…