NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover completes its primary mission to the Red Planet.
The car-sized Perseverance rover touched down on the floor of Mars’ Jezero Crater on February 18, 2021, launching an ambitious surface mission designed to last a year on the Red Planet, or approximately 687 Earth days.
This time is now up; the Mars calendar turned for Perseverance on Friday (January 6). But don’t worry: the six-wheeled robot will seamlessly transition to an extended mission on Saturday, January 7.
Related: 12 amazing photos from the Perseverance rover’s 1st Earth year on Mars
Perseverance has two main tasks on the red planet. The rover is searching for possible signs of life on Mars at the bottom of the 28-mile (45-kilometre) wide Jezero, which was home to a large lake and river delta billions of years ago. Perseverance also collects and caches dozens of samples, which a joint NASA-European Space Agency (ESA) campaign will bring to Earth for detailed study in the early 2030s, if all goes as planned.
This campaign will launch a rocket-equipped NASA lander as well as an ESA Earth Return Orbiter to the Red Planet in the mid to late 2020s. The plan calls for Perseverance to drive its samples to the lander; the rocket will then launch the precious cargo into Mars orbit, where the ESA probe will catch it and return the material to Earth.
Perseverance has made a lot of progress on the sampling front so far. The rover has already filled and sealed 18 of its 38 titanium sample tubes (opens in a new tab) as well as three of its five “test tubes”, which will help mission team members assess the cleanliness of Perseverance’s sampling system.
And the rover has also started caching samples, so far dropping four of the 10 planned tubes on a part of Jezero’s floor that the mission team calls Three Forks. This repository is a backup, to cover the possibility that Perseverance may not be able to transport its samples to the lander when the time comes. (The rover is in good shape now, but there’s no guarantee that its health will last until the end of the decade.)
In this case, two small helicopters which will take off on board the lander will pick up the sample tubes one by one from the depot.
With this hedge in mind, the mission team collected two samples from each of its target rocks. Perseverance is keeping one set on board and caching the other set.
The recovery helicopters will be heavily based on Ingenuity, the 4-pound (1.8 kilogram) helicopter that traveled to Mars with Perseverance.
Ingenuity’s main job was to show that aerial exploration is possible on Mars despite the planet’s weak atmosphere, which is only 1% as dense as Earth’s at sea level. quickly achieved this goal during a five-flight demonstration campaign and is now serving as a scout for Perseverance on an ambitious extended mission.
Ingenuity now has 37 flights to its credit, which together traveled a total of 4.7 miles (7.6 kilometers). Perseverance, for its part, has racked up nearly 8.7 miles (14.0 km) of off-Earth riding, and that total will increase significantly during its extended mission.
After finishing dropping samples at the Three Forks depot, Perseverance will head to the top of the old Jezero River delta, likely completing the ascent in February. The rover will then explore the area for the next eight months or so, looking for, among other things, rocks washed into the crater by the ancient Jezero River.
“The Delta Top campaign is our opportunity to get a glimpse of the geological process beyond the walls of Jezero Crater,” Katie Stack Morgan, assistant project scientist for Perseverance, from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said last month. from South. (opens in a new tab).
“Billions of years ago, a raging river carried debris and boulders miles beyond the walls of Jezero,” she said. “We’re going to explore these ancient river deposits and get samples of their long-standing boulders and rocks.”
Mike Wall is the author of “The low (opens in a new tab)(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in a new tab). Follow us on twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in a new tab) Or on Facebook (opens in a new tab).
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