Mars 2020 Mission Overview

• The Mars 2020 rover mission is part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, a long-term effort of robotic exploration of the Red Planet. 
• The Mars 2020 mission addresses high-priority science goals for Mars exploration, including key questions about the potential for life on Mars.
• The Perseverance rover is the centerpiece of NASA’s Mars 2020 mission.

About the Perseverance rover

• Perseverance is the biggest, most sophisticated Mars rover ever built — a car-size vehicle bristling with cameras, microphones, drills and lasers.
• The rover will hunt for signs of habitable environments on Mars while searching for signs of past microbial life.

• The plutonium-powered, six-wheeled rover will drill down and collect tiny geological specimens that will be brought back to the earth in about 2031 by a series of missions.
• The analysis of Martian rocks on Earth will likely provide a reliable indication of whether life on Mars is feasible in the past or at present.
• Perseverance will explore the Jezero Crater, which is an ancient (more than 3 billion years ago)  lakebed where microbial life could have developed. 

MOXIE 

• Perseverance will carry a unique instrument, MOXIE or Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment: which for the first time will manufacture molecular oxygen on Mars using carbon dioxide from the carbon-dioxide-rich atmosphere. 
• ISRU means In Situ Resource Utilization: or the use of local resources to meet human needs or requirements of the spacecraft.
• Without ISRU, exploration of Mars in the future decades will be incredibly expensive and thereby impossible. 
• If astronauts have to carry oxygen or water or rocket fuel for their journey for a two-year journey to Mars and back, the cost will be understandably excessive.

Ingenuity Mars Helicopter

• The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter is a technology demonstration, carried by the Perseverance rover.
• A technology demonstration is a project that seeks to test a new capability for the first time, with limited scope.
• The rover will release the mini helicopter that will attempt the first powered flight on another planet, and test out other technology to prepare the way for future astronauts. 
• The flight will be challenging because Mars’ thin atmosphere (which is 99% less dense than Earth’s)  makes it difficult to achieve enough lift.

Why in News?

NASA launched its Mars Perseverance Rover on an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on July 30, 2020.

More in the News

• Two other NASA landers are also operating on Mars — 2018’s InSight and 2012’s Curiosity rover. 
• Six other spacecraft are exploring the planet from orbit: three from the U.S., two from Europe and one from India.
• NASA’s first ever Mars rover mission was in 1997 when the Mars Pathfinder Mission with the Sojourner rover landed on the Martian soil.
• It was followed by the twin rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, to Mars in 2003.
• No other country has put a rover on Mars or any other planet. 
• If China’s Tianwen-1, launched recently succeeds, it will become only the second nation after the United States to have a rover on another planet.

References:

1. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/6-things-to-know-about-nasas-ingenuity-mars-helicopter/
2. https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/