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Cape Canaveral (United States) (AFP)
NASA launches its Perseverance rover towards Mars on Thursday, designed to search for traces of microbes that may have populated the place more than 3,000 million years ago. The vehicle carries a mini-helicopter that will try to make the first flight of a device on another planet.
The launch, which will take place with an Atlas V rocket from the United Launch Alliance, is scheduled for 07:50 (11:50 GMT) in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
If it reaches the red planet intact on February 18, 2021, Perseverance will be the fifth rover to make the trip since 1997. They were all Americans so far, but China launched its first Martian rover last week, which is slated for landing in May. from 2021.
Mars could have three rovers active next year, with the American Curiosity, which has traveled 23 km on the planet since 2012.
“There is no doubt, it is a challenge,” Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator, said of the mission on Wednesday. “There is no other way to say it, it is not easy. And it is very risky from the point of view of the chances of success. That said, we know how to land on Mars, we have done it eight times already.”
– Helicopter on board –
The new rover, built at NASA’s legendary Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the California city of Pasadena, is an improved version of Curiosity: its six wheels are stronger, faster, smarter, and can self-pilot 200 meters every day.
The vehicle is three meters long, weighs a ton, has 19 cameras, two microphones – a novelty – and a two-meter robotic arm. A plutonium generator will charge your batteries.
Once on Mars, NASA will attempt to launch the 1.8-kilo Ingenuity helicopter into the Martian air, dense as 1% of Earth’s atmosphere. The objective is to demonstrate that it is possible.
NASA is highly interested in planetary aerial exploration, as rovers can only travel a few tens of kilometers in their lifetime and are vulnerable to dunes and other reliefs, although Perseverance will be able to scale obstacles 40 cm high. A first drone (Dragonfly) will be sent in 2026 to Titan, Saturn’s largest moon.
The main mission of the NASA robot will be to look for traces of past life. Scientists believe they have evidence that more than 3 billion years ago, Mars was warmer and covered with rivers and lakes, ingredients that gave birth to microbes on Earth. Later, the red planet became cold and dry, for reasons that astronomers still do not know.
Perseverance will also collect thirty tube rock samples, which a future joint mission of the United States and Europe will retrieve and bring to Earth no earlier than 2031.
The indisputable proof of a past life on Mars, if there really was one, will likely not be confirmed before analysis of those samples in the next decade, said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s chief scientist.
– What a life? –
“We are surely looking for a very primitive life form, not advanced forms like skeletons or fern fossils,” said Ken Farley, a project scientist at Caltech University.
NASA plans to land Perseverance in the Jezero crater, formed some 3.8 billion years ago, and more precisely in a delta-like location.
Those geographical features are formed when rivers deposit sediments at their mouth. “Deltas are great places to preserve organic matter and other types of biosignatures,” said Tanja Bosak, a member of the mission’s scientific team and a member of MIT.
The advantage of Mars, unlike Earth, is that the crust is not constantly renewed by the movement of tectonic plates. On Earth it is very difficult to find intact land for 3,000 million years.
“Mars preserves an incredibly complex and diversified geology on its surface,” said Lori Glaze, head of NASA’s planetary exploration programs. The entire history of the planet was engraved on its surface.
More than 350 geologists, geochemists, astrobiologists, atmospheric experts and other scientists from around the world are participating in the mission, which will last for at least two years, and surely much longer, given the great resistance of previous rovers.
© 2020 AFP
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