Perseverance Lands on Mars

The Perseverance rover safely landed on Mars around 4 pm eastern time on February 18th , 2012. The rover was set down in the Jezero Crater where it will spend around two earth years (one Martian year). Perseverance rover will seek signs of ancient life and collect rock and soil samples for possible return to Earth by 2031. By the time the NASA team had received confirmation of the beginning of the landing sequence, it as actually over. There is an 11 minute communication delay and the landing sequence is only 7 minutes long.

Launched on July 30, 2020 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida the Perseverance rover has spent 7 months traveling to Mars. The Perseverance rover is the fifth rover that NASA has landed on the planet. The first rover Sojourner, demonstrated in 1997 that a robot could rove on the Red Planet. NASA’s next Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, discovered evidence that the planet once had running water before becoming a frozen desert. The Curiosity rover which was the size of a car landed in 2012. Curiosity discovered that its landing site, Gale Crater, hosted a lake billions of years ago and an environment that could have supported microbial life. The Perseverance rover aims to take the next step, seeking to determine that there potential signs of past microbial life, or biosignatures on Mars.

The verification of ancient life on Mars carries an enormous burden of proof. Perseverance is the first rover to bring a sample caching system to Mars that will package promising samples for return to Earth by a future mission. Rather than pulverizing rock the way Curiosity’s drill does, Perseverance’s drill will cut intact rock cores that are about the size of a piece of chalk and will place them in sample tubes that it will store until the rover reaches an appropriate drop-off location on Mars. The rover could also potentially deliver the samples to a lander that is part of the planned Mars sample return campaign by NASA and ESA (the European Space Agency).

Once the samples are here on Earth we can examine them more precisely with instruments too large and complex to send to Mars, providing far more information about them than even the most sophisticated rover could.

Also carried to Mars on this mission is the helicopter, Ingenuity, a small, autonomous aircraft that was carried to the surface of the Red Planet attached to the belly of the Perseverance rover. The helicopter will be placed on the surface to if powered flight in the thin Martian air is possible. Its performance during these experimental test flights will help determine if small helicopters are possible for future Mars missions, where they could perform in a support role as robotic scouts, surveying terrain from above.

The video below was made by NASA. It incorporates the first update from the Perseverance rover was released on Monday.