NASA Perseverance rover ready to explore the wilds of Mars – CNET [CNET]

Mars will soon be welcoming another visitor from Earth. NASA is sending its Perseverance rover to collect samples, search for signs of past microbial life and even unleash an experimental helicopter.

Perseverance is scheduled to launch on July 17, 2020, kicking off a multi-month journey through space before arriving at the red planet in February 2021. Landing is a tense process, but, if all goes well, Perseverance will join NASA’s Curiosity as the only functioning rovers on Mars. 

The Perseverance rover is the size of a small car. Its “head” holds cameras on top of a neck-like mast. These act as the rover’s eyes, helping it record the martian surface, look ahead for hazards and snap gorgeous landscape views. This design gives the rover “a human-scale view,” according to NASA.

NASA’s Perseverance rover will touch down in a previously unexplored part of Mars called Jezero Crater. The space agency announced the winning landing site in late 2018. 

This Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter image shows the Jezero Crater delta region. “The landing site in Jezero Crater offers geologically rich terrain, with landforms reaching as far back as 3.6 billion years old, that could potentially answer important questions in planetary evolution and astrobiology,” said NASA’s Thomas Zurbuchen. 

Put your wheels in the air like you just don’t care. NASA’s rover team put the Perseverance rover through a series of tests during its final preparations in April 2020. These tests included balancing the rover, a concept similar to balancing a car’s wheels. NASA added weight to the rover chassis to achieve this. 

Mars is a tough landscape. It’s sandy and rocky and can be punishing on a rover’s wheels, as the Curiosity rover knows. Perseverance’s six aluminium wheels are made with cleats that will give them traction in tricky surface conditions. Each wheel is 20.7 inches (52.5 centimeters) in diameter.

One of the wildest aspects of the Perseverance mission is that it will include a helicopter. The small helicopter, named Ingenuity, will ride on the rover’s belly until NASA finds a suitable spot to release it for a test flight. 

This image shows the flight model of the helicopter in early 2019. NASA considers Ingenuity a high-risk, high-reward technology demonstration. If it works, it will be a stunning achievement in flight on another planet.

In April 2020, NASA tucked the Mars Ingenuity helicopter into the belly of the Perseverance rover. The Mars-copter will be protected by a shell during the descent to the planet’s surface in February 2021. NASA intends to deploy the helicopter about two and a half months after the rover lands.

The Perseverance rover won’t ever forget its own name. It will go to Mars wearing a titanium nameplate. It’s not just decorative. “The plate serves as rock and debris shield to protect a flexible cable that carries power and data from computers in the rover’s body to actuators in the arm, as well as to the instruments and the drill in the turret,” said NASA.

NASA’s Perseverance rover will be doing a lot of sampling of Mars. In May 2020, engineers installed a set of sample tubes into the rover’s belly. “Each tube is sheathed in a gold-colored cylindrical enclosure to protect it from contamination,” said NASA.

Perseverance will be in charge of placing samples in the tubes, but it will be up to a future Mars mission to pick them up. NASA hopes to collect at least a dozen samples and eventually retrieve them for study on Earth.

Perseverance will look for signs of past microbial life in the Jezero Crater on Mars. This photo shows a collection of stromatolites, rounded accumulations of fossilized microbes and sediment, found right here on Earth in Nevada. 

“Scientists hope to find something similar in the dry lakebed Perseverance will be exploring on Mars,” said NASA.

It takes a big rocket to get off this rock. This United Launch Alliance Atlas V booster will escort NASA’s Perseverance rover into space from Florida. This look at the Atlas V comes from late May 2020 at Cape Canaveral. 

NASA shared this look at the rocket-powered rover descent stage in 2018. This crucial component of the landing system helps to slow the rover’s arrival and then lowers the vehicle to the surface using a “sky crane” maneuver.

“Nylon cords spool out to lower the rover 25 feet (7.6 meters) below the descent stage; When the spacecraft senses touchdown at Jezero Crater, the connecting cords are severed and the descent stage flies off,” said NASA in describing the landing process.

It takes a lot of specialized equipment to safely land a rover on Mars. The bowl-shaped back shell will keep the Perseverance rover protected as it enters the Martian atmosphere.

NASA wants its Perseverance rover to have a pleasant and gentle arrival on Mars in February 2021. To do that, it needs a big parachute. This still image comes from a September 2018 test that mimicked the conditions of Mars. 

The successful test was one in a series and gave NASA confidence in the parachute system. “It was the fastest inflation in history of a parachute this size and created a peak load of almost 70,000 pounds of force,” said NASA.