Perseverance, the NASA Explorers Already Reached To …

HOUSTON – Travel outer space the length of the explorer Mars NASA almost over. The car-sized Perseverance cruiser, which was launched on July 30, 2020, is scheduled to land inside the 28-mile (45 kilometers) wide Jezero Crater on February 18. Also read: Scientists Find Martian Minerals Buried in Antarctic Ice

“I am delighted to be here today because our countdown to Mars has reduced from a few months to just a few weeks,” said Lori Glaze, Director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division, in a press conference on Wednesday (27/12/2021). “Perseverance is getting closer to the Red Planet, and our team is preparing it to land at Jezero Crater.”

Perseverance is at the heart of NASA’s $ 2.7 billion Mars 2020 mission, which will mark a new breakthrough in exploration of the Red Planet. For example, explorers will hunt for evidence of ancient Martian life on the surface of Jezero, which hosted lakes and river deltas billions of years ago. No previous Red Planet robot has done such work (although NASA’s twin Viking landers, which landed in 1976, did look for signs of extant organisms).

It might be difficult for Perseverance to make a definitive detection of ancient life, if there was one, said members of the mission team. But another pioneering aspect of the rover mission could enable this breakthrough, if an on-site observation of Perseverance alone wouldn’t be enough.

Perseverance will begin efforts to return the first human Mars samples. The robot is designed to collect and store several dozen samples, which the NASA-European Space Agency campaign will bring to Earth in early 2031.

That pure Martian material will be studied by scientists here over the next few decades, just as researchers are still researching the Apollo lunar rocks today, 50 years after they were collected, Glaze said. And astrobiological investigations will no doubt be a high priority for the teams that get to the rock and soil that Perseverance collects.

“The samples from Mars have the potential to change our understanding of the origin, evolution and distribution of life on Earth and elsewhere in the solar system,” said Glaze.

Mars 2020 is also designed to pave the way for bold future exploration endeavors. For example, a small helicopter named Ingenuity is traveling to the Red Planet with a Perseverance belly. Shortly after landing, Ingenuity will descend and perform several short test flights, the first of which will be conducted by helicopter in an extraterrestrial world.

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