The US space agency successfully launched Perseverance in late July from the Cape Canaveral launch site, Florida. Since then, the three-meter-long cart – costing more than 2.2 billion euros – has been on its way to the red planet.
Sign of life
The goal of the mission is to find traces of life in a crater called Jezero. This crater is located in the northern hemisphere of the planet and was created by an impact of a meteorite. There are strong suspicions that it was once filled with water.
But for that Perseverance must land first, something that has not always gone well in the past with Mars missions. How NASA envisions the landing is shown in this slick animation.
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Pick up samples
Perseverance will take soil samples in the Jezero crater if that goes well. The plan is that these samples will be picked up by another Mars rover in a subsequent mission in seven years and eventually returned to Earth in the year 2031.
The latter with the help of ESA, the European space agency to which the Netherlands will contribute 383.5 million euros between 2020 and 2023.
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The Mars rover is a fine piece of technology. So hangs the cart full of cameras (23 pieces), microphones and antennas. Perseverance also has a robotic arm and a drill.
Most innovative, however, is a small helicopter that travels in the rover’s abdomen to study the Martian surface from the air as an experiment.
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Crowds on Mars
NASA isn’t alone in entering the red planet. Since the distance between Mars and Arde was favorable last summer, China and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are also engaged in Mars missions. The UAE is a satellite that investigates the atmosphere, the Chinese hope to land their own Mars rover in May.
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