Perseverance rover
- August 8, 2021
- Posted by: OptimizeIAS Team
- Category: DPN Topics
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Perseverance rover
Subject: Science and Technology
Context: NASA’s Perseverance rover is exploring the Jezero Crater on Mars and attempting to collect its first rock samples.
Concept:
NASA says that sampling Mars is one of the most complicated tasks and involves drilling holes, collecting and then storing the samples in test tubes.
Perseverance rover
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has launched its Mars 2020 Perseverance rover aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V. The launch took place from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
- The rover carries 43 titanium sample tubes and is supposed to collect samples from the Jezero Crater.
- Perseverance’s sampling process is autonomous — its sampling and caching system uses a hollow coring bit and percussive drill that is fixed at the end of its 7-feet-long robotic arm.
- Perseverance will spend one Mars year (two years on Earth) on the planet during which time it will explore the landing site region.
- The Jezero Crater where it landed was once the site of an ancient river delta — scientists know this because of evidence collected during previous landed and orbital missions that point to wet conditions on the planet billions of years ago.
- The rover is carrying with it seven instruments, which include an advanced camera system with the ability to zoom, a SuperCam, which is an instrument that will provide imaging and chemical composition analysis, and a spectrometer.
- One of the most interesting instruments aboard the rover is called MOXIE, which will produce oxygen from Martian atmospheric carbon dioxide. If this instrument is successful, then future astronauts (as of now, no human being has kept foot on Mars) can use it to burn rocket fuel for returning to Earth.
- The rover is also carrying Ingenuity, the first helicopter to fly on Mars that will help collect samples from the surface from locations where the rover cannot reach.
- Broadly, the rover is designed to study signs of ancient life, collect samples that might be sent back to Earth during future missions, and test new technology that might benefit future robotic and human missions to the planet.
- If Mars once harboured a warmer atmosphere enabling water to flow in its ancient past (3.5-3.8 billion years ago), and if microbial life had once existed on the Red Planet, it is possible that it exists in “special regions” even today.