Perseverance will do things no rover has ever attempted on Mars — and pave the way for humans

[F-22Raptor]

(CNN)After years of designing, building, planning and testing, the NASA Perseverance rover's launch readiness review has concluded, and it's a go for launch on July 30.

Perseverance is armed with a multitude of new capabilities and instruments to explore and experience the red planet.

The rover is designed to determine whether life existed on ancient Mars, characterize the Martian climate and geology and prepare for human exploration. It will investigate Jezero Crater and search for any evidence that the ancient lake bed once supported life.

Perseverance will collect up to 43 samples of Martian rock and soil over the course of its two-year mission. These samples will be stowed in white tubes on the Martian surface to be returned to Earth on a future planned mission.

Riding along with Perseverance to Mars is Ingenuity, the first helicopter that will be flown on another planet. It's one of several experiments that will test technological capabilities during this mission that may be used more in future missions.

Here's a look at some of the other exciting features of Perseverance and how it can help pave the way for humans landing on Mars in the future.



Robotic eyes and ears


The rover's high-resolution camera "eyes" will help Perseverance survey the landscape, look for intriguing rocks to sample and decide where to deploy some of its instruments.

Perseverance's cameras will be capturing video during the rover's "seven minutes of terror" as it lands itself on Mars without any help from its teams on Earth, due to the unavoidable communication delay between the two planets.

While the video won't be available in real time during entry, descent and landing, it will be shared in the weeks after landing.


The rover is also carrying a couple of microphones, and the rover teams look forward to hearing the sounds of the rover's wheels on the Martian surface and the sound of wind on Mars.

The other microphone is on SuperCam, a scientific instrument that fires a laser at rocks and creates a plasma cloud that can provide the chemical makeup of the rock.

"When we fire this laser on Earth, you can hear a pop or zap," said Matt Wallace, deputy project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "The science team is hoping with a microphone on top of the mast, they can learn something about the composition of the things their laser is interacting with."

SHERLOC goes to Mars


The rover's robotic arm has 21st-century scientific abilities.


The Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry, better known as PIXL, is a tiny, powerful X-ray beam that can detect over 20 chemical elements by pointing a beam at rocks. The beam produces a telling glow associated with each element present in about 10 seconds.

Its partner is known as SHERLOC, short for the long-winded Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals.

SHERLOC can seek out organic molecules and minerals, which helps inform science teams of where to collect and cache samples. Its ultraviolet laser will provide a different glow depending on the organic molecules and minerals it detects.

"These two new capabilities will allow us to investigate a postage stamp-size area for elemental chemistry and organic molecules," said Ken Farley, Perseverance's project scientist at the California Institute of Technology. "So we can both make a map of this small area and take a microscopic image. It's a compelling way to look for microbial biosignatures."

SHERLOC also carries five different materials used to make spacesuits to test how radiation and elements on Mars could weather and affect them for future human explorers.


And where would SHERLOC be without WATSON, a camera that can take microscopic images of grains in rock and textures? WATSON stands for Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering.



A self-driving vehicle


Human rover teams at NASA will send Perseverance commands once a day, but the rover will rely on its advanced computer "brains" to help it drive autonomously the rest of the time.

Compared to previous rovers, Perseverance has the benefit of a second "brain" installed to help Perseverance land itself on Mars and avoid hazards that will be repurposed once it's on the surface.

The "brain," officially known as a vision compute element (VCE), will help it do something called "thinking while driving," said Heather Justice, robotic operations downlink lead at JPL.


The rover will take images and build a map as it drives, identifying obstacles or slopes in the images and deciding what it can drive around or over to figure out a path forward.



It's better than GPS


Perseverance will land on Mars using the new Terrain Relative Navigation system, which allows the lander to avoid any large hazards in the landing zone.

"In past missions, the landing zone needed to be like a parking lot," totally clear of debris, said Andrew Johnson, the rover's manager of the guidance navigation control system. But in the case of Perseverance, "you can place it in craters, steep slopes, rock fields."


A sensor called the lander vision system takes pictures during the parachute descent stage. This matches up with the map provided by images taken from orbit, creating a guide that can identify craters, mountains and other landmarks.

The system provides safe target selection by using its map to rank landing sites for their safety. The lander can look for the safest place to land or even divert to a specific spot if it identifies a hazard. And all of the images collected during the landing stage will be sent to the team on Earth.

This system could later be used to land humans on the moon, as well as Mars.



This rover has MOXIE


Astronauts exploring Mars will need oxygen, but carting enough to sustain them on a spacecraft isn't viable.

Perseverance will carry an apparatus called MOXIE, or the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, to convert Mars' plentiful carbon dioxide into the oxygen astronauts will need to breathe. Oxygen will also be needed for fuel.

With MOXIE, "you don't have to take an estimated 27 metric tons of oxygen to Mars" to get them home," said Mike Hecht, principal investigator for MOXIE at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.


The small MOXIE experiment will switch on and convert carbon dioxide into oxygen for a couple of hours every month or two of the mission, using about a day's worth of energy on the rover. It will only produce about 10 grams of oxygen an hour -- enough for half of a person, Hecht said.

The MOXIE team will apply lessons learned for developing a larger and more powerful system for a manned mission.

"If a bunch of Mark Watneys are going to risk their lives, we better make sure it works," Hecht said, citing the main character in the novel "The Martian" by Andy Weir.



Monitoring weather and environment


Understanding the weather and environment on Mars will be crucial for determining the conditions astronauts will face.

That's why the rover has its own monitoring sytem. The Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer, called MEDA, is a suite of sensors on the rover to study weather science, dust and radiation, and how they change over Martian seasons.


The instrument will characterize the planet's environment beyond weather -- including variables like temperature, pressure and wind -- and gain a better understanding of solar radiation on the surface, according to Manuel de la Torre Juarez, deputy principal investigator for MEDA. The instrument was contributed by a team from the Center for Astrobiology in Madrid.

The temperature on Mars can vary by as much as 80 or 90 degrees between day and night. Understanding radiation from the surface will tell scientists how much the sun heats the air, which causes wind and temperature changes. They could also understand more about the water cycle of Mars.



Peeking beneath the surface


For the first time, a surface mission will include a ground-penetrating radar instrument called RIMFAX, or Radar Imager for Mars' Subsurface Experiment. It will be able to peek beneath the surface and study Martian geology, looking for rock, ice and boulder layers.

Scientists hope that RIMFAX will help them understand the geologic history of Jezero Crater, according to David Paige, principal investigator for the experiment at the University of California, Los Angeles.


In the future, RIMFAX, or a version of it, could be used by astronauts to find water beneath the surface.

"One of the most useful things we can find is ice below the surface," Paige said. "It would probably be included in future landers and rovers or airborne vehicles in searching for resources."

Together, the suite of instruments and experiments on Perseverance will add more pieces to complete the puzzle of Mars.

"Rover missions are designed as situation comedies with an ensemble cast," Paige said. "Each member has a specific role that contributes to the overall science and addresses a certain subset of questions. Our main goal is, 'Thank goodness we brought a RIMFAX with us.'"

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/28/world/mars-perseverance-rover-technology-scn/index.html

 

[Pakistan Space Agency]

All the best NASA / US.

 

[Dalit]

LOL what a kneejerk reaction from the Americans after China launched its own Mars mission.

LOL at US patent on assistance to humanity. The humanity should bow down to US Mars mission in gratitude. So much venom. So much anger and hate.

 

[I S I]

NASA & SpaceX

LOL what a kneejerk reaction from the Americans after China launched its own Mars mission.

LOL at US patent on assistance to humanity. The humanity should bow down to US Mars mission in gratitude. So much venom. So much anger and hate.

Well this is planned like ages ago.

 

[F-22Raptor]

LOL what a kneejerk reaction from the Americans after China launched its own Mars mission.

LOL at US patent on assistance to humanity. The humanity should bow down to US Mars mission in gratitude. So much venom. So much anger and hate.

Knee jerk? This mission has been planned for YEARS.

 

[Dalit]

Knee jerk? This mission has been planned for YEARS.

Stop using words like humans and humanity. Humanity owes you nothing.

You Americans love to brag about your achievements. Learn the meaning of being humble.

 

[Uguduwa]

LOL what a kneejerk reaction from the Americans after China launched its own Mars mission.

LOL at US patent on assistance to humanity. The humanity should bow down to US Mars mission in gratitude. So much venom. So much anger and hate.

dear illiterate. stop putting LOL at the beginning of every sentence like some village idiot learnt a new word

 

[F-22Raptor]

Stop using words like humans and humanity. Humanity owes you nothing.

You Americans love to brag about your achievements. Learn the meaning of being humble.

We actually owe a ton to NASA and their exploration of the universe . We’d understand next to nothing without their work over the last 50+ years.

 

[Dalit]

We actually owe a ton to NASA and their exploration of the universe . We’d understand next to nothing without their work over the last 50+ years.

STFU. You stole from the Russians who were way ahead of you in the space race.

NASA is nothing without foreign bright minds just like the rest of US industry. Just have a good look at how many foreign employees work at NASA.

 

[F-22Raptor]

Perseverance is a massive rover! All the best!

 

[Dalit]

View attachment 656528

Perseverance is a massive rover! All the best!

China's Mars mission will beat US Mars mission. You will see.

 

[F-22Raptor]

After years of studies, test-firings and a survey of U.S. industry in preparation for launch of a Mars Sample Return mission in 2026, NASA has settled on a solid-fueled design for a miniature rocket with a first-of-its-kind purpose: Launching a payload from Mars for a trip back to Earth.


The small launcher is called a Mars Ascent Vehicle, or MAV. The MAV will play a key role in the Mars Sample Return mission being developed by NASA and the European Space Agency.

The first element of the Mars Sample Return mission is NASA’s Perseverance rover scheduled to depart Earth in mid-July. Perseverance will collect core samples from Martian rocks and store them in tubes for retrieval by a future rover that could launch as soon as 2026.

With two launches from Earth scheduled for 2026, NASA and ESA will send to Mars a stationary landing platform with the MAV, a mobile robot to fetch soil samples collected by NASA’s Perseverance rover, and an Earth Return Orbiter to bring the specimens back home.

The U.S.-built Sample Retrieval Lander will target a landing zone near Perseverance and deploy a European fetch rover to pick up the already-sealed sample tubes and deposit them back at the lander. The tubes will then be robotically transferred into the payload module on top of the Mars Ascent Vehicle, which will launch the samples into orbit around Mars.

ESA’s Earth Return Orbiter, fitted with NASA-supplied hardware to capture and contain the Mars samples, will rendezvous with the specimens in orbit around Mars and contain the alien soil in a return capsule to prevent contamination. Then the spacecraft will depart Mars and head for Earth, deploying the sample-carrying re-entry container to plunge into the atmosphere and crash-land the Utah desert in 2031.

“We’re actively working on humanity’s first round trip to another planet,” said Jim Watzin, director of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program.

With estimated cost of $7 billion, the multi-part mission is ambitious, but NASA officials argue it is achievable.

“When you look at the building blocks for the architecture, they’re all, for the most part, either very similar to the things we’ve done before, or at most an extension,” Watzin said in an interview last week with Spaceflight Now. “The protection of the samples, the containment of the samples, that’s new territory.”

Scientists want to protect the samples not only from contamination caused by terrestrial spores and organic materials from Earth. They’re also focused on ensuring material from Mars does not endanger the Earth ecosystem, a concept known as backward planetary protection.

“We’ve invested for five years now in developing the concepts … and feel pretty comfortable that we have an angle on it,” he said.

“We’re trying to keep this as simple as possible,” Watzin said. “This is by no means a simple task. It is complex -… but you can keep it as simple as possible.”

One of the untried mission elements required for the Mars Sample Return program is the rocket that will boost the rock specimens off of the Red Planet.

Based on preliminary design constraints, the Mars Ascent Vehicle can be no taller than 9.2 feet (2.8 meters) and no wider than 1.9 feet (57 centimeters). Its total liftoff mass must not exceed 881 pounds (400 kilograms).

Martian gravity is just 38 percent that of Earth, meaning a rocket designed to launch a payload into orbit can be much smaller on Mars. And the MAV only has to deliver some 30 to 35 pounds (14 to 16 kilograms) of payload into orbit around Mars.

The requirements stack up to create MAV concept that is tiny by launch vehicle standards, but it’s just enough to do the job, according to NASA engineers.

Engineers at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, have determined a two-stage, solid-fueled rocket is the best choice for the Mars Ascent Vehicle.

NASA previously looked at using a single-stage hybrid propulsion system for the MAV, which would have burned a solid wax-based fuel in combination a liquid oxidizer. That made sense, Watzin said, because engineers were concerned the effects of a “cold soak” — or prolonged exposure to cold temperatures — on solid propellant grains.

NASA worked with two hybrid propulsion providers to perform test-firings of hybrid rockets, but agency officials decided in the last few months to go with a two-stage Mars Ascent Vehicle powered by solid rocket motors.

Officials selected Jezero Crater, home to an ancient dried-up river delta, as the landing site for the Perseverance rover, the centerpiece of NASA’s Mars 2020 mission. That makes Jezero Crater the landing site and launch site for Sample Retrieval Lander and the MAV.

“When the landing site was picked for Mars 2020 as Jezero Crater, then the thermal regime that we had to be able to tolerate warmed up significantly, several tens of degrees centigrade warmer,” Watzin said in a recent interview with Spaceflight Now. “So that brought us back into the trade space of also being able to look at solid rocket motors.”

Results from ground testing also showed a single-stage hybrid propulsion system was not quite ready to use in the Mars Ascent Vehicle.

“The test program, the technology program, on the hybrids identified the fact that they still had some work to do in terms of being able to re-light the motors which we needed for the second burn to achieve orbit, and the strategies for providing the right oxidation, the right ignition characteristics that we needed,” Watzin said. “So it was becoming more and more complex and apparent to be less and less mature than what we thought it was.

“Meanwhile, solid rocket motors are very much a known and established entity,” Watzin said. “The technologies are well understood. So the advantages disappeared. We made a selection to go with something that we know and understand, that was not necessarily going to have a big challenge with the new, revised temperature limits that we’re going to face.”

The MAV will launch in mid-2026 with the U.S.-built Sample Retrieval Lander and the European fetch rover. Under current mission plans, the rocket won’t be fired until mid-2029 to begin the return trip to Earth.

Watzin said NASA doesn’t see the long-term storage of the solid-fueled MAV as one of the sample return program’s biggest challenges.

“We think there’s a lot of analogy to what we do here on Earth,” he told Spaceflight Now. “There’s maybe a more direct analogy to missiles in some respects. A lot of missiles are built and stored for years, if not decades, before they’re called into service to operate. So we know how to safely store motors. That’s been done many, many times in both defense and aerospace science research and flight applications.

“All our vehicles these days fly autonomously,” Watzin said. “We’ve been flying around Mars enough that we have a pretty good understanding of the gravity there. So we don’t see that as a big challenge here.”


NASA plans to purchase rocket motors for the Mars Ascent Vehicle from Northrop Grumman, which supplies solid-fueled rocket motors for military missiles and satellite launchers.

“Northrop Grumman, in their recent acquisitions, they bought up a lot of the solid motor capability in the country,” Watzin said. “And they have built — meaning the conglomerate group that they now own — has built solid rocket motors for us in the past with the colder temperature chemical formulations. So we did a market survey and we looked at what else was out there, and it turned out that they’re the ones that have the capability.”

In a sole-source procurement announcementearlier this month, NASA said it intends to award Northrop Grumman a contract to deliver 20 rocket motors — 10 first stage and 10 second stage motors — for the Mars Ascent Vehicle. The motor sets include test articles and primary and backup flight-ready motors, according to the procurement announcement.

NASA says Northrop Grumman collected data from the space agency’s Long Duration Exposure Facility, or LDEF, mission in the 1980s on the long-term exposure of solid propellants to the harsh environment of space for nearly six years. Thiokol Propulsion, which is now part of Northrop Grumman after a series of corporate acquisitions, developed a solid rocket motor for NASA’s Magellan spacecraft that successfully fired after more than 15 months in space to place the probe into orbit around Venus.

According to NASA, Northrop Grumman owns a proprietary solid propellant formulation that could be used for the Mars Ascent Vehicle.

The Trump administration’s fiscal year 2021 budget request would advance development of NASA’s part of the sample return campaign, while ESA member states last year agreed to pay for the early stages of Europe’s contribution. NASA’s Sample Retrieval Lander, the MAV and the European fetch rover would launch from Cape Canaveral in July 2026 on a U.S. rocket, followed later in the year by liftoff of the Earth Return Orbiter from French Guiana on a European Ariane 64 rocket.

“These are the earliest technically and programmatically viable dates to implement this architecture, and it’s the first of only two opportunities that remain prior to the mid-2030s,” Watzin said. “The second opportunity would be in the ’28 timeframe.”

The Earth Return Orbiter will reach Mars first, then use solar-electric thrusters to spiral down into a low-altitude orbit around the Red Planet. Once in place, the orbiter will provide communications relay support for the Sample Retrieval Lander, which will propulsively land on Mars in mid-2028.

Launching the second and third elements of the Mars Sample Return campaign in 2026 will also allow engineers to pursue a solar-powered lander and fetch rover because the critical sample transfer operations will not occur in winter, or during the Mars global dust storm season, said Austin Nicholas, the Mars Sample Return mission lead engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Mission designers are keeping the option open to use the Perseverance rover — if it’s still operating in 2029 — to deliver the samples to the MAV. That adds redundancy to the plan in case the fetch rover runs into trouble.

“After the surface missions are completed, the MAV will be launched,” Nicholas said. “The MAV launch will be observed by both the fetch rover and Mars 2020, so that will enable understanding of how that event transpired.”

Once the MAV deploys the sample canister in Mars orbit, the Earth Return Orbiter will rendezvous and capture the specimens, then sterilize or contain the Martian material before departing the Red Planet for the trip home.

The return orbiter will release a re-entry module protected by a heat shield to descend through Earth’s atmosphere in 2031 for a crash landing in Utah.

Engineers plan to return the samples without a parachute. Instead, the armored entry vehicle will crash into the ground at high speed.

NASA officials say drop tests show the samples will still be in good condition after a high-speed landing, and the tubes flying on the Perseverance rover were designed with the no-chute return in mind.

Engineers and scientists are concerned about the risk extraterrestrial samples might pose to humans and Earth’s environment, so the entry capsule would have to be designed to withstand a parachute failure.

The Perseverance rover is launching with 43 sample tubes. Five of the tubes will be blanks — they will not be filled with Martian samples — to help scientists analyzing the specimens sort out what molecules came from Mars, and what originated on Earth.

The samples from Mars will be the first returned from the surface of another planet. The material will be sent to laboratories for detailed assessments.

Asked last year about using commercial vehicles, such as SpaceX’s planned Starship, for the Mars Sample Return campaign, Watzin said NASA is focused on using proven technology.

“We knew that we would like do this sooner rather than later, so it didn’t seem sensible to go down a path where we had to develop, from the beginning, a brand new delivery system, when the delivery systems we’re familiar with and have been successful with are adequate to support the execution of the mission,” Watzin said. “If that (Starship) capability matures and shows up, I’m sure programmatically we will take full advantage of it, but it didn’t seem to make sense, since we don’t really know what it’s going to be, or when it’s going to be there, to make it the basis for the campaign.”

Concepts to harvest resources like ice and air on Mars to produce rocket propellant are also not mature enough to rely on for a mission scheduled to launch in the 2020s, officials said.

Watzin told Spaceflight Now that the most pressing challenge for mission planners is orchestrating the roles of the Perseverance rover and the elements scheduled for the two launches in 2026.

“Portions of it are done individually, but it all comes together into that integrated campaign (at Mars) that takes a little bit over 13 months to happen,” Watzin said. “I think that’s what’s unique. That’s where we’ll have a lot of the challenges.”


A multi-mission campaign to retrieve and return samples from Mars to Earth was ranked as the highest priority in planetary science in by the National Academies in 2011. NASA responded by starting development of the Mars 2020 mission with the recently-named Perseverance rover.

The rest of the sample return program was left open-ended until 2017, when NASA and ESA began detailed planning.

https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/04/20/nasa-narrows-design-for-rocket-to-launch-samples-off-of-mars/


Perseverance is part 1 of Mars Sample Return and this is Part 2. Of course, it’s possible SpaceX could send humans to Mars before this mission returns samples. Either way, sample return is in the works!

 

[F-22Raptor]

China's Mars mission will beat US Mars mission. You will see.

Space is really hard and anything can happen, but Perseverance is far more ambitious and technically challenging than China’s mission.

 

[F-22Raptor]

We will see angry white boy.

The angry one is you. Your the one attacking this mission.

 

[Pakistan Space Agency]

China's Mars mission will beat US Mars mission. You will see.

Do you even have any understanding of space exploration at all?

I suggest you at least study the basics to appreciate what NASA has achieved.