Perseverance Rover

NASA’s science rover Perseverance, streaked through the Martian atmosphere and landed safely on the floor of a vast crater.

perseverance

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 Perseverance rover is the centrepiece of NASA’s Mars 2020 mission.
The primary aim is to search for possible fossilized signs of microbes that may have flourished on Mars some 3 billion years ago, when the fourth planet from the sun was warmer, wetter and potentially hospitable to life.
Perseverance will explore the Jezero Crater, which is an ancient (more than 3 billion years ago) lakebed where microbial life could have developed.
Scientists hope to find bio-signatures embedded in samples of ancient sediments that Perseverance is designed to extract from Martian rock for future analysis back on Earth – the first such specimens ever collected by humankind from another planet.
Larger and packed with more instruments than the four Mars rovers preceding it, Perseverance is set to build on previous findings that liquid water once flowed on the Martian surface and that carbon and other minerals altered by water and considered precursors to the evolution of life were present.
Two other NASA landers are also operating on Mars — 2018’s InSight and 2012’s Curiosity rover.

Perseverance carries 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.

The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter is a technology demonstration, to be carried by the Perseverance rover.
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.

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