Two new rovers, a helicopter and a satellite all set out this year to search for signs of ancient life.
Humans have wondered if there’s ever been life on Mars for as long as we’ve known it’s a planet. We could soon have an answer. In February, NASA landed its Mars Perseverance rover, along with a companion helicopter, the intrepid Ingenuity, in an ancient river delta called Jezero Crater. The NASA mission, dubbed Mars2020, was designed to search for signs of ancient life and collect drilling samples to return to Earth for deeper analysis.
Perseverance builds on the legacy of its six-wheeled predecessors, which have shown that Mars was once a wet and habitable planet. Now, astronomers hope to find out whether it was ever actually inhabited. The new rover’s tantalizing landing site and advanced instruments offer the best hope yet for a conclusive answer.
That’s why NASA made significant engineering improvements to Mars2020’s navigation systems. Newly designed systems let the spacecraft see the surface during descent, calculate its exact position and course-correct toward a tightly constrained landing site. Elsewhere, upgrades to the rover’s autonomous driving program also let the robot travel faster than ever before. On a daily basis, Perseverance will cover about as much ground as the Mars rover single-day record, about two football fields.
The rover’s life-hunting abilities come thanks to a robotic arm designed specifically to study rock surfaces, and another instrument that gives NASA an up-close look at rock textures. These instruments — dubbed SHERLOC and WATSON — are mapping minerals and organic molecules on rocks that Perseverance finds along its journey. Any interesting samples get a more in-depth analysis using the suite of instruments in the rover’s mobile lab.
“We’ll be studying these samples for decades to come, like how we still conduct studies on samples we got back from the moon,” Verma says. “Scientists who haven’t been born yet ... will be studying these samples using technologies that haven’t been invented yet.”
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