NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter launched on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V 541 rocket from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 7:50 a.m. EDT on July 30, 2020.
The Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover and Ingenuity helicopter are on the way to Mars after the July 30 7:50 a.m. launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Image credit: NASA.
The Perseverance rover mission will address high-priority science goals for Mars exploration.
Developed under NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, it will seek signs of past microbial life and characterize the planet’s climate and geology.
It will also collect samples of Martian rocks and dust for a future Mars Sample Return mission to Earth, while paving the way for human exploration of the Red Planet.
Perseverance will land in Jezero Crater on Mars on February 18, 2021.
Home to a lake billions of years ago, Jezero isn’t a typical Mars crater.
“This is a wonderful place to live for microorganisms,” said Perseverance project scientist Dr. Ken Farley, of Caltech, speaking of the time when the lake was still there.
“And it is also a wonderful place for those microorganisms to be preserved so that we can find them now so many billions of years later.”
The car-sized Perseverance is also the largest, heaviest robotic Mars rover NASA has built.
The rover is about 3 m (10 feet) long not including the robotic arm, 2.7 m (9 feet) wide and 2.1 m (7 feet) tall. But at 1,025 kg (2,260 pounds), it weighs less than a compact car.
Its robotic arm is equipped with a rotating turret, which includes a rock drill, science instruments and a camera.
But while Perseverance’s arm is 2.1 m (7 feet) long, just like Curiosity’s, its turret weighs more — 45 kg (99 pounds) — because it carries larger instruments and a larger drill for coring. The drill will cut intact rock cores, and they’ll be placed in sample tubes via a complex storage system.
Perseverance also has a six-wheel, rocker-bogie design derived from all of NASA’s Mars rovers to date that helps to maintain a relatively constant weight on each of the rover’s wheels and minimizes tilt.
The wheels are slightly narrower and taller than Curiosity’s but are similarly machined out of a rigid, lightweight aluminum alloy.
Both Curiosity and Perseverance have wheels lined with grousers — raised treads that are specially designed for the Martian desert.
This artist’s concept depicts NASA’s Mars rover Perseverance on the surface of the Red Planet. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech.
Perseverance is carrying seven different scientific instruments:
(i) Mastcam-Z is an advanced camera system with panoramic and stereoscopic imaging capability with the ability to zoom;
(ii) SuperCam is an instrument that can provide imaging, chemical composition analysis, and mineralogy at a distance;
(iii) Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL) is an X-ray fluorescence spectrometer and high-resolution imager, which will map the fine-scale elemental composition of Martian surface materials;
(iv) Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals (SHERLOC) is a spectrometer that will provide fine-scale imaging and uses an ultraviolet (UV) laser to map mineralogy and organic compounds;
(v) The Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) is a technology demonstration that will produce oxygen from Martian atmospheric carbon dioxide;
(vi) Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA) is a set of sensors that will provide measurements of temperature, wind speed and direction, pressure, relative humidity, and dust size and shape;
(vii) Radar Imager for Mars’ Subsurface Experiment (RIMFAX) is a ground-penetrating radar that will provide centimeter-scale resolution of the geologic structure of the subsurface.
NASA’s Mars helicopter Ingenuity. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech.
Another special feature on Perseverance can be found on the aft crossbeam: a plate that contains three silicon chips stenciled with the names of approximately 10.9 million people from around the world who participated in the online ‘Send Your Name to Mars’ campaign from May to September 2019.
The fingernail-sized chips also contain the essays of 155 finalists in NASA’s ‘Name the Rover’ essay contest.
The chips share space on an anodized plate with a laser-etched graphic depicting Earth and Mars joined by the star that gives light to both and a message in Morse code in the Sun’s rays: ‘Explore as one.’
Perseverance is also bringing a twin-rotor, solar-powered helicopter named Ingenuity to test out aerial flight on another planet for the first time.
“The Wright Brothers showed that powered flight in Earth’s atmosphere was possible, using an experimental aircraft,” said Ingenuity’s chief pilot Dr. Håvard Grip, a researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
“With Ingenuity, which weighs only about 1.8 kg (4 pounds), we’re trying to do the same for Mars.”
Perseverance is ferrying 23 cameras to the Red Planet — the most ever flown in the history of deep-space exploration. Two cameras are installed on the Ingenuity helicopter.
