On February 18, 2021, the spacecraft carrying Perseverance accelerated to 20,000 km/hour to “break through” the Martian atmosphere and reach the planned destination, after a seven-month journey.
On Earth, what has been dubbed the “7 minutes of terror” took place – given the delay that exists for communications to cross the distance between the two planets – while the rover performed a series of risky maneuvers, out of sight and out of sight. possibility of intervention by the engineers of the NASA team.
The arrival of the first video images sent by Perseverance was therefore received with great emotion by the team: the rover successfully made love in the place it was intended for. Thus began the Perseverance mission on Mars, whose main objective is to search for ancestral signs of life.
Perseverance can be seen as the “principal investigator” of the Mars 2020 mission, but there is another major protagonist: Ingenuity, a mini helicopter that the rover carried with it and which has surprised by its resilience to adverse conditions.
The first test was to fly over the Martian surface at an altitude of three meters for 30 seconds, and it resulted Successful.
Watch the video that made history of the first vehicle to take off on Mars
However, the 1.8 kg helicopter already repeated the feat a number of times, successfully, and has been adding more and more flight time over Martian lands. On December 5th, when it completed its 17th flight, it surpassed the mark of 30 minutes of accumulated time and more than 3,500 meters in distance covered. He has also climbed to 12 meters in altitude and walked as fast as five meters per second.
NASA says the importance of Ingenuity’s flight is to obtain accurate and valuable data, so that it can fine-tune and create improved versions of Martian helicopters, which will help scientists explore the red planet in the future.
355 martian days at a glance
A year later, Perseverance has traversed, as planned, Jezero Crater, a 45-kilometer-wide basin located in the northern hemisphere of Mars. About 3.5 billion years ago, a river flowed into a body of water the size of Lake Tahoe, depositing fan-shaped sediment known as a delta.
The rover’s science team believes that this ancient river delta and lake deposits may have collected and preserved organic molecules and other potential signs of microbial life, which is why this has been the region of choice for rock sample collection.
Discover the main “sights” of Jezero Crater visited by Perseverance
The rock sample collection is going well and is recommended and has already resulted in surprising discoveries, such as the high probability that the Martian terrain resulted from volcanic lava, which translates into implications for the understanding and accurate dating of critical events in Crater’s history. Jezero, as well as the rest of the planet.
The researchers linked to the mission were also able to conclude that the rocks in the crater interacted with water several times over the different eras and that some even contain organic molecules.
Another great news is the discovery of organic compounds by the SHERLOC instrument – Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals. The finding is not confirmation that life existed on Jezero and left biosignatures, as organic compounds can be created by biological and non-biological mechanisms.
Such a conclusion can only be drawn when the samples are returned to Earth and analyzed by tools more advanced than those that can be taken to Mars, but for now the researchers are satisfied by the confirmed possibility that the instruments integrated in Perseverance have detected the presence of organic compounds preserved in the samples.
In the coming months, we will continue to wait for more scientific discoveries, especially because there is still almost half of the mission to be completed, which should last at least one Martian year – which corresponds to 687 days on Earth, but everyone expects that time to be exceeded, similarly what has happened with other missions on Mars, such as the rover Curiosityfor example, which already has more than 3,000 “travel” days on the Red Planet and is still “for the curves”.
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