Eyeing some of the components that enabled the Perseverance rover to get safely to the Martian surface could provide valuable insights for future missions.
This image of Perseverance’s backshell and supersonic parachute was captured by NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter during its 26th flight on Mars on April 19, 2022. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Entry, descent, and landing on Mars is fast-paced and stressful, not only for the engineers back on Earth, but also for the vehicle enduring the gravitational forces, high temperatures, and other extremes that come with entering Mars’ atmosphere at nearly 12,500 mph (20,000 kph). The parachute and backshell were previously imaged from a distance by the Perseverance rover.
But those collected by the rotorcraft (from an aerial perspective and closer) provide more detail. The images have the potential to help ensure safer landings for future spacecraft such as the Mars Sample Return Lander, which is part of a multimission campaign that would bring Perseverance’s samples of Martian rocks, atmosphere, and sediment back to Earth for detailed analysis.
“Perseverance had the best-documented Mars landing in history, with cameras showing everything from parachute inflation to touchdown,” said
Perseverance’s backshell, supersonic parachute, and associated debris field is seen strewn across the Martian surface in this image captured by NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter during its 26th flight on April 19, 2022. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
In the images of the upright backshell and the debris field that resulted from it impacting the surface at about 78 mph (126 kph), the backshell’s protective coating appears to have remained intact during Mars atmospheric entry. Many of the 80 high-strength suspension lines connecting the backshell to the parachute are visible and also appear intact. Spread out and covered in dust, only about a third of the orange-and-white parachute – at 70.5 feet (21.5 meters) wide, it was the biggest ever deployed on Mars – can be seen, but the canopy shows no signs of damage from the supersonic airflow during inflation. Several weeks of analysis will be needed for a more final verdict.
Flight 26 Maneuvers
Ingenuity’s 159-second flight began at 11:37 a.m. local Mars time April 19, on the one-year anniversary of its first flight. Flying 26 feet (8 meters) above ground level, Ingenuity traveled 630 feet (192 meters) to the southeast and took its first picture. The rotorcraft next headed southwest and then northwest, taking images at pre-planned locations along the route. Once it collected 10 images in its flash memory, Ingenuity headed west 246 feet (75 meters) and landed. Total distance covered: 1,181 feet (360 meters). With the completion of Flight 26, the rotorcraft has logged over 49 minutes aloft and traveled 3.9 miles (6.2 kilometers).
This image of Perseverance’s backshell and parachute was collected by NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter during its 26th flight on April 19, 2022. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
“To get the shots we needed, Ingenuity did a lot of maneuvering, but we were confident because there was complicated maneuvering on flights 10, 12, and 13,” said Håvard Grip, chief pilot of Ingenuity at JPL. “Our landing spot set us up nicely to image an area of interest for the Perseverance science team on Flight 27, near ‘Séítah’ ridge.”
The new area of operations in Jezero Crater’s dry river delta marks a dramatic departure from the modest, relatively flat terrain Ingenuity had been flying over since its first flight. Several miles wide, the fan-shaped delta formed where an ancient river spilled into the lake that once filled Jezero Crater. Rising more than 130 feet (40 meters) above the crater floor and filled with jagged cliffs, angled surfaces, projecting boulders, and sand-filled pockets, the delta promises to hold numerous geologic revelations – perhaps even proof that microscopic life existed on Mars billions of years ago.
Upon reaching the delta, Ingenuity’s first orders may be to help determine which of two dry river channels Perseverance should climb to reach the top of the delta. Along with route-planning assistance, data provided by the helicopter will help the Perseverance team assess potential science targets. Ingenuity may even be called upon to image geologic features too far afield for the rover to reach or to scout landing zones and sites on the surface where sample caches could be deposited for the Mars Sample Return program.
More About Ingenuity
The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter was built by JPL, which also manages the project for NASA Headquarters. It is supported by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley and NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, provided significant flight performance analysis and technical assistance during Ingenuity’s development. AeroVironment Inc., Qualcomm, and SolAero also provided design assistance and major vehicle components. Lockheed Space designed and manufactured the Mars Helicopter Delivery System.
At NASA Headquarters, Dave Lavery is the program executive for the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter.
More About Perseverance
A key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust).
Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.
The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.
JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.
On Wednesday, Dec. 29 (sol 306) Perseverance successfully cored and extracted a sample from a Mars rock. Data downlinked after the sampling indicates that coring of the rock the science team nicknamed Issole went smoothly. However, during the transfer of the bit that contains the sample into the rover’s bit carousel (which stores bits and passes tubes to the tube processing hardware inside the rover), our sensors indicated an anomaly. The rover did as it was designed to do – halting the caching procedure and calling home for further instructions.
This is only the 6th time in human history a sample has been cored from a rock on a planet other than Earth, so when we see something anomalous going on, we take it slow. Here is what we know so far, and what we are doing about it.
The anomaly occurred during “Coring Bit Dropoff.” It’s when the drill bit, with its sample tube and just-cored sample nestled inside, is guided out of the percussive drill (at the end of the robotic arm) and into the bit carousel (which is located on the rover’s chassis). During processing of previous cored rock samples, the coring bit travelled 5.15 inches (13.1 centimeters) before sensors began to record the kind of resistance (drag) expected at first contact with the carousel structure. However, this time around the sensor recorded higher resistance than usual at about 0.4 inches (1 centimeter) earlier than expected, and some much higher resistance than expected during the operation.
The team requested additional data and imagery to ensure proper understanding of the state post anomaly. Because we are presently operating through a set of “restricted Sols” in which the latency of the data restricts the type of activities we can perform on Mars, it has taken about a week to receive the additional diagnostic data needed to understand this anomaly.
Armed with that data set, we sent up a command to extract the drill bit and sample-filled tube from the bit carousel and undock the robotic arm from the bit carousel. During these activities, a series of hardware images were acquired.
The extraction took place yesterday (1/6) and data was downlinked early this morning. These most recent downlinked images confirm that inside the bit carousel there are a few pieces of pebble-sized debris. The team is confident that these are fragments of the cored rock that fell out of the sample tube at the time of Coring Bit Dropoff, and that they prevented the bit from seating completely in the bit carousel.
The designers of the bit carousel did take into consideration the ability to continue to successfully operate with debris. However, this is the first time we are doing a debris removal and we want to take whatever time is necessary to ensure these pebbles exit in a controlled and orderly fashion. We are going to continue to evaluate our data sets over the weekend.
This is not the first curve Mars has thrown at us – just the latest. One thing we’ve found is that when the engineering challenge is hundreds of millions of miles away (Mars is currently 215 million miles from Earth), it pays to take your time and be thorough. We are going to do that here. So that when we do hit the un-paved Martian road again, Perseverance sample collection is also ready to roll.
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has now collected two rock samples, with signs that they were in contact with water for a long period of time boosting the case for ancient life on the Red Planet.
“It looks like our first rocks reveal a potentially habitable sustained environment,” said Ken Farley, project scientist for the mission, in a statement Friday. “It’s a big deal that the water was there for a long time.”
The six-wheeled robot collected its first sample, dubbed “Montdenier” on September 6, and its second, “Montagnac” from the same rock on September 8.
Both samples, slightly wider than a pencil in diameter and about six centimeters long, are now stored in sealed tubes in the rover’s interior.
A first attempt at collecting a sample in early August failed after the rock proved too crumbly to withstand Perseverance’s drill.
The rover has been operating in a region known as the Jezero Crater, just north of the equator and home to a lake 3.5 billion years ago, when conditions on Mars were much warmer and wetter than today.
The rock that provided the first samples was found to be basaltic in composition and likely the product of lava flows.
Volcanic rocks contain crystalline minerals that are helpful in radiometric dating.
This in turn could help scientists build up a picture of the area’s geological history, such as when the crater formed, when the lake appeared and disappeared, and how climate changed over time.
“An interesting thing about these rocks as well is that they show signs for sustained interaction with groundwater,” NASA geologist Katie Stack Morgan told a press conference.
The scientists already knew the crater was home to a lake, but couldn’t rule out the possibility that it had been a “flash in the pan” with floodwaters filling up the crater for as little as 50 years.
Now they are more certain groundwater was present for much longer.
“If these rocks experienced water for long periods of time, there may be habitable niches within these rocks that could have supported ancient microbial life,” added Stack Morgan.
The salt minerals in the rock cores may have trapped tiny bubbles of ancient Martian water.
“Salts are great minerals for preserving signs of ancient life here on Earth, and we expect the same may be true for rocks on Mars,” added Stack Morgan.
NASA is hoping to return the samples to Earth for in-depth lab analysis in a joint mission with the European Space Agency sometime in the 2030s.
Earlier this month, the Perseverance rover set out to collect some rock samples on Mars. It was supposed to be a key moment in the rover’s historic sample-return mission, one in which Perseverance was to collect, store and return Martian rock and soil samples to Earth. (The rocket that will pick up the samples hasn’t launched yet, and may not for almost a decade; currently, Perseverance is doing the grunt work of collection.) To date, Perseverance had been highly successful: its risky landing worked perfectly, and Ingenuity, the 4-pound helicopter that hitched a ride to Mars on Perseverance’s back, overcame massive barriers to become the first powered-controlled flight on another planet. Compared to those feats, Perseverance’s next task — drilling out a finger-sized hole in a rock — seemed simple. But after the drilling, the collection tube came back empty. Mission control was in disbelief.
As Salon previously reported, scientists rushed to figure out why the sample went missing. Did the drill somehow miss? It didn’t seem so — images from the Red Planet revealed there was a hole in the rock.
So what happened once the drill came out of the rock?
After some sleuthing, NASA’s Perseverance team determined that the rock most likely crumbled into “small fragments” — essentially, a powder. While the pulverization of the rock sample was disappointing to the team, it was also a lesson in Martian geology.
“It’s certainly not the first time Mars has surprised us,” said Kiersten Siebach, an assistant professor of planetary biology at Rice University and participating scientist on the science and operations team for Perseverance. “A big part of exploration is figuring out what tools to use and how to approach the rocks on Mars.”
Siebach explained that something similar sometimes happens to geologists here on Earth. Certain rocks look solid, their appearance having been retained by their chemistry. But weathering events and erosion can weaken that chemistry.
“If you’ve hiked in California, sometimes it looks like you’re hiking next to a rock. But if you kick it, it falls apart into dust,” Siebach said. “It’s probably something like that, where there’s been more weather than anticipated.”
Mars is a curious place, geologically speaking. The surface of the planet is rocky, dusty; and thanks to previous missions like the Sojourner rover, Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity, we know that the soil is toxic. High concentrations of perchlorate compounds, meaning containing chlorine, have been detected and confirmed on multiple occasions. In some spots, there are volcanic basaltic rocks like the kind that we have on Earth in Iceland, Hawaii or Idaho.
Raymond Arvidson, professor of earth and planetary sciences at Washington University in St. Louis and a Curiosity science team member, explained that one big difference between Earth and Mars though is that Earth has active plate tectonics — meaning that Earth’s surface is comprised of vast, continent-spanning “plates” that move and shift and abut against each other, creating valleys and mountains. Such geology has given Earth places like Sierra Nevada mountain range. Mars, however, never had plate tectonics.
Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon’s weekly newsletter The Vulgar Scientist.
“So those very primitive rocks that are called the basaltic, like we have in the oceans — that’s the dominant mineralogy and composition of rocks on Mars,” Arvidson said. “It’s basically a basalted planet — not as complicated as here, not as many rocks.” Jezero Crater, a 28 mile-wide impact crater and former lake located north of the Martian equator, is where Perseverance touched town. Arvidson noted that the crater has diverse geology: “It has clays, it has faults and carbonate, many of them produced [around] three and a half billion years ago.”
For that reason, scientists believe Jezero may be an ideal spot to search for ancient signs of microbial life on Mars. Perseverance is now headed to the next sampling location in South Seitah, which is within Jezero Crater.
Notably, the tubes and instruments on Perseverance were built to collect more solid samples, and that’s because the aim of this mission is to see if these rocks contain evidence of microbes, or any ancient fossilized life.
“Do these rocks contain evidence for life?” Arvidson asked. “To answer those questions, you need to get the rock back to Earth.”
Arvidson said that these soft sedimentary rocks that turn into powder when you drill are “everywhere” on Mars. Previous rovers encountered them too.
“For example with Curiosity, which landed in Gale Crater in 2012 — and we’d been driving up the side of the mountain called Mount Sharp — we encountered soft sedimentary rocks that were easy to drill, and we’d get powders back,” Arvidson said. “Then we found really hard rock that we couldn’t drill into, so we gave up. Jezero is going to have hard rocks and soft rocks.”
As Siebach previously mentioned, what happened with Perseverance is a learning experience. Scientists, Siebach said, rely on a basaltic signal from orbit to determine the mineralogy and composition of Jezero Crater’s floor.
“It’s a little bit ambiguous. . . we don’t see a strong signal of hydration or something in these rocks in particular, instead, they look like most rocks on Mars which means they have a lot of these volcanic minerals and some dust on top,” Siebach noted. However, orbital surveillance is not foolproof. “We don’t know whether this crater floor was actually volcanic,” Siebach added.
Hence, scientists won’t always be certain about the consistency of the sample areas they choose to drill. But once on Mars, it’s a mix of science, educated guessing, and luck to really find what they’re looking for to bring back home.
“Some of these rocks could have a composition that makes it look igneous, when they could be sedimentary or igneous rocks,” Siebach said. “That’s the kinds of compositions we’re seeing that makes it challenging and fun.”
Siebach emphasized she has confidence that Perseverance will have success in sampling some of the other rocks.
“Those surprises and those unexpected events are what drives our curiosity and asking more questions, and learning more about this history of Mars that is written in these rocks,” Siebach said. “If the sampling doesn’t go as we expect, those surprises are inherent to discovery, and will drive us to learn more.”
But the truly exciting science will happen when the samples get back to Earth eventually.
“We will be able to learn so much about Mars from those samples,” Siebach said.
NASA believes it knows why Perserverance’s first Mars rock sample went missing.
As Salon previously reported, earlier this month scientists attempted to collect samples from the Red Planet and deposit them in one of the Perseverance rover’s 43 collection tubes. At first, everything appeared to be running smoothly: the rover drilled a tiny finger-size hole in the rock, and photos showed an obvious hole in said rock. But a follow-up analysis revealed that there were no rock samples in the tube.
What happened?
After analyzing data and photos from the rover for several days, NASA’s Perseverance team determined that the rock most likely crumbled into “small fragments.”
“It appears that the rock was not robust enough to produce a core,” Louise Jandura, chief engineer for the sampling system, wrote in a NASA blog post on Wednesday. “The material from the desired core is likely either in the bottom of the hole, in the cuttings pile, or some combination of both.”
Cue spooky music.
“Both the science and engineering teams believe that the uniqueness of this rock and its material properties are the dominant contributor to the difficulty in extracting a core from it,” Jandura further explained. “Therefore, we will head to the next sampling location in South Seitah, the farthest point of this phase of our science campaign.”
Perseverance first selected a rock in Jezero Crater, a 28 mile-wide impact crater and former lake which, scientists believe, is an ideal place to look for evidence of ancient microbial life on Mars. But it turns out that that rock “did not cooperate this time,” Jandura said.
“It reminds me yet again of the nature of exploration,” Jandura said. “A specific result is never guaranteed no matter how much you prepare. Despite this result, science and engineering have progressed.”
Perseverance is a sample-return mission, meaning that Perseverance will collect and store Martian rock and soil samples, which will eventually be returned to Earth. Obviously, obtaining the sample is key to this mission, which is why NASA scientists experienced “a rollercoaster of emotions,” according to Jandura, when the sample wasn’t there.
Sample return missions are extremely rare due to their expense; indeed, there has never been a sample return mission from another planet. While the mission to return samples from Mars has yet to be fully planned, NASA scientists say that if all goes to plan we could have samples from Mars back on Earth by 2031.
Let’s hope they can obtain a sample in South Seitah next time around, in September.
“Based on rover and helicopter imaging to date, we will likely encounter sedimentary rocks there that we anticipate will align better with our Earth-based test experience,” Jandura said.
Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon’s weekly newsletter The Vulgar Scientist.
Last week, NASA’s Perseverance rover shot for a new milestone in the search for extraterrestrial life: drilling into Mars to extract a plug of rock, which will eventually get fired back to Earth for scientists to study. Data sent to NASA scientists early on August 6 indicated a victory—the robot had indeed drilled into the red planet, and a photo even showed a dust pile around the borehole.
“What followed later in the morning was a rollercoaster of emotions,” wrote Louise Jandura, chief engineer for sampling and caching at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a blog post yesterday describing the attempt. While data indicated that Perseverance had transferred a sample tube into its belly for storage, that tube was in fact empty. “It took a few minutes for this reality to sink in, but the team quickly transitioned to investigation mode,” Jandura wrote. “It is what we do. It is the basis of science and engineering.”
By now, the team has a few indications of what went wrong in what Katie Stack Morgan, deputy project scientist of the Mars 2020 mission, calls “the case of the missing core.”
“We’ve successfully demonstrated the sample caching process, yet we have a tube with no core in it,” she says. “How could it be possible that we have carried out all of these steps perfectly and successfully, yet there is no rock—and no anything—in the tube?”
One theory, of course, was that the rover had simply dropped the core sample. But there were no broken pieces on the surface. Also, Stack Morgan says, the tube was “very clean, not even dusty, suggesting that there was perhaps nothing that had ever gotten into the tube.”
NASA scientists now think that the core was actually pulverized in the drilling process, then scattered around the borehole. “That would explain why we don’t see any pieces in the hole and why we don’t see any pieces on the ground because they have basically become part of the cutting,” says Stack Morgan. “So we started to think about why that happened because that is not a behavior that the engineers saw in the very extensive test set of rocks that they cored prior to launch.”
Perseverance is drilling in Jezero Crater, which used to cradle a lake, and therefore may have been home to ancient microbial life. (It’s been relying on the Mars helicopter, Ingenuity, to scout ahead for spots to dig.) By digging into the rock instead of just sampling dust at the surface, the rover will provide vital clues about the geological history of the planet. The Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars in 2012, also drilled, but it was designed to grind the rock instead of extracting cores. This time, NASA engineers want samples that let them observe the rock as it was laid down so they can analyze it for hallmarks of life—some microbes, for instance, leave behind characteristic minerals.
For Perseverance, the drilling process actually begins inside the rover in a section called the adaptive caching assembly. Here, a robotic arm takes a tube out of storage and inserts it into the “bit carousel,” a storage container for all of Perseverance’s coring bits. The carousel then rotates, presenting the tube—which is about the same shape and size as a laboratory test tube—to the 7-foot-long arm that will actually do the drilling. “We pick up that coring bit, and that has the tube inside,” said Jessica Samuels, surface mission manager for Perseverance, in an interview before the first drilling attempt. “And now at that time we’re ready to actually acquire the sample.”
To get that rock, the drill on the larger robotic arm both rotates into the ground (the way you’d use an apple corer) and hammers into it. All the while, the rover is sensing its progress as it drills. This data feeds into an algorithm that automatically adjusts the drilling, for instance adding more or less hammering. Once the robot has bored far enough, it has to break the rock sample off, so it will actually shift the drill. “It causes the tube inside the coring bit to actually shift to the side to cause that core-break motion,” said Samuels.
Ideally, the robot will come up with a chalk-sized piece of Mars. Perseverance will actually repeat this process many more times, taking multiple samples from the crater. Think of it like drawing a blood sample: The phlebotomist swaps tubes in and out as they fill up, only Perseverance swaps the containers as they fill with rock.
Once a tube is full, the drilling arm then docks it back in the bit carousel within the adaptive caching assembly. Now the smaller arm picks up the sample and shuttles it around to different stations. There’s a probe, for example, that measures the volume of the sample and a camera that snaps photos of the tube. Then it’s off to a dispenser that plops a seal into the tube, and then yet another station that pushes down on the seal to activate it. The camera takes a few more pictures of the sample, just to make sure everything looks good, and finally it is sent back to temporary storage in the robot’s belly.
The robot is expected to collect about three dozen samples as it rolls around Mars. “We drive around with these tubes until we’re ready to drop them off in a collective cache,” said Samuels. The tubes will wait in this cache until a future Mars sample return mission picks them up and ferries them to Earth. “The science team is looking for all different types of rocks—sedimentary, igneous—to be able to bring back because they’re going to tell us different things about Mars,” she continued. Once the retrieval mission returns, scientists from many different institutions will be able to study the geology of the red planet.
The robot is doing this autonomously. Like its sibling rovers, Perseverance can’t rely on a human on Earth to constantly pilot it around Mars—it takes up to 20 minutes for radio signals to travel between the two planets. So Perseverance is largely a set-it-and-forget-it kind of science machine. “It is completely hands-off, from the beginning where the sample tube is taken out of storage, and all the way through the sample acquisition process, all the way to the point where it goes back into storage,” said Samuels. “All of that is autonomous.”
And while the first drilling attempt didn’t exactly go as planned, what initially seemed like a problem might actually provide vital clues about the Martian geology. Going into the maneuver, Stack Morgan and other NASA scientists reckoned the rock was either a sedimentary or a basalt (crystalized magma). Given how the rock behaved when drilled, now they are leaning towards basalt, which crystallizes at depth to form coarse grains. “When we started to core this rock, it basically broke up along these kind of disintegrating grain boundaries,” says Stack Morgan.
This is exciting because Perseverance is drilling in a former lake bed. If it can drill into sedimentary rock—layers of muck laid down by the lake—that could potentially provide signatures of microbial life. But igneous rock like basalt provides a timeline: Scientists can date when the magma turned into hard rock.
In other words, Perseverance may have stumbled onto something exhilarating. “Honestly, the best-case scenario would have been that we successfully cored this rock,” says Stack Morgan. “But the next-best scenario is that we have potentially discovered a sequence of rocks where we have the opportunity both to explore the habitability of this area while also providing those age constraints that tell us exactly when Jezero Crater was habitable.”
NASA hasn’t yet released a date for Perseverance’s next move, but chief engineer Louise Jandura wrote in her blog post that the rover will leave the first borehole behind and continue to the next sampling location, which the Ingenuity helicopter has identified as likely to be sedimentary rock “that we anticipate will align better with our Earth-based test experience.”
“The hardware performed as commanded, but the rock did not cooperate this time,” she continued. “It reminds me yet again of the nature of exploration. A specific result is never guaranteed, no matter how much you prepare.”
The NASA Perseverance rover’s SuperCam instrument delivered its first results earlier this week.
Lazer shootings determined the nature of the rock targets being examined.
Insider takes a look at the six-wheeled robot’s latest developments.
See more stories on Insider’s business page.
NASA’s Perseverance rover’s SuperCam science instrument delivered its first-results earlier this week, after lazer-shooting a target rock.
The SuperCam is a device that studies rocks and soil with a camera, lazer, and spectrometers to identify organic compounds that could be related to past life on Mars. It can identify the atomic and molecular makeup of targets as far as 20 feet away, NASA reported.
The high-intensity lazer is a technique that has also been deployed by NASA’s previous rover, Curiosity.
On Thursday, NASA released an audiotape of its rover zapping a target rock named “Máaz.” The recording of the lazer strikes has allowed scientists to uncover more useful information, including the hardness of the subjects being examined. “If we tap on a surface that is hard, we will not hear the same sound as when we fire on a surface that is soft,” said Naomi Murdoch, from the National Higher French Institute of Aeronautics and Space, in Toulouse, per BBC News.
Scientists were able to reveal that Máaz was basaltic, meaning it contained a substantial amount of magnesium and iron, BBC News reported.
They are yet to discover whether the “rock itself is igneous, ie volcanic, or perhaps if it is a sedimentary rock made up of igneous grains that were washed downriver into Jezero lake and cemented together,” said SuperCam chief investigator, Roger Wiens, in a BBC News report.
Perseverance’s key developments so far
Since its historical landing last month, the Perseverance rover has delivered a range of high-resolution images and audio recordings from the Martian terrain to Earth.
One of the rover’s first developments was its camera providing front and rear images of Perseverance’s successful landing on Mars. This was followed by audio recordings from microphones that were attached to the rover. They revealed the sounds of a Martian breeze — the first sounds in history to be recorded on the planet.
The wind was gusting at 5 meters per second (11 mph), according to Dave Gruel, NASA’s lead engineer for Perseverance’s camera and microphone systems.
A 360-degree panorama taken by the rover’s Mastcam-Z tool was another key establishment, as it allowed people to take a full look around the robot’s home in Jezero Crater.
Earlier this month, the six-wheeled robot went for its first drive on Mars. As it drove, the rover snapped shots of its wheel tracks in the dirt behind it. NASA’s Perseverance engineers and scientists are already planning routes for the rover to travel in order to reach the river delta that once fed Lake Jezero, as Insider previously reported.
“Our first drive went incredibly well,” said Anais Zarifian, who works on the rover’s mobility team, in a press briefing. “I don’t think I’ve ever been happier to see wheel tracks, and I’ve seen a lot of them.”
Unprecedented audio recordings taken by NASA’s Perseverance rover are transporting us to the surface of the Red Planet, allowing us to hear the sound of a gentle alien breeze, and the click-clicking of lasers zapping a Martian rock.
We’re exactly three weeks into the Perseverance mission, so it’s still early days. The project is in the deployment phase, with the Mars 2020 team systematically deploying each of the rover’s many instruments to make sure they’re working properly and configured for the science phase of the mission. Perseverance will spend the next two years or more exploring Jezero crater, so there’s no need to rush things along.
The team recently rolled out the rover’s aptly named SuperCam, in an early showcase of the instrument’s tremendous potential. Affixed to the rover’s mast, the 12-pound (5.4–kilogram) SuperCam can perform five different types of geological analysis, allowing the team to select the best rocks for sampling.
These explorations are important from a geological perspective, but also from an astrobiological perspective. Rocks in Jezero crater—a former lake—could contain fossils or other biomarkers indicative of former microbial life. Whereas the key goal of the ongoing Curiosity mission was to determine if Mars was once habitable (it apparently was), the Perseverance rover is actually looking for evidence of ancient aliens (to be clear, habitability is different than inhabited; Mars may have once fostered the conditions for life, but that doesn’t mean life actually took root on the Red Planet).
G/O Media may get a commission
The SuperCam instrument was developed by the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and a consortium of French labs headed by the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales. The first data packet from SuperCam was recently received at the French Space Agency’s control center in Toulouse, according to a NASA statement. Newly released SuperCam images show a pair of rocks, dubbed Yeehgo and Máaz, in exquisite detail.
“It is amazing to see SuperCam working so well on Mars,” Roger Wiens, the principal investigator for SuperCam, said in the statement. “When we first dreamed up this instrument eight years ago, we worried that we were being way too ambitious. Now it is up there working like a charm.”
Perseverance is also unique in that it’s capable of recording sounds on Mars. NASA has provided three different audio samples, and they include the first acoustic recording of laser shots on Mars, and the sound of Martian winds.
Perseverance recorded the laser sounds at a distance of 10 feet (3.1 meters) from the target rock. The clicking sounds produced by the laser pulses vary, allowing scientists to infer various physical characteristics of the target, such as hardness.
“SuperCam truly gives our rover eyes to see promising rock samples and ears to hear what it sounds like when the lasers strike them,” explained Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for science at NASA headquarters in Washington, DC, in the statement. “This information will be essential when determining which samples to cache and ultimately return to Earth through our groundbreaking Mars Sample Return Campaign, which will be one of the most ambitious feats ever undertaken by humanity.”
The future mission Zurbuchen is referring to will be quite historic, as the samples cached by Perseverance would represent the first Martian materials returned to Earth for analysis.
The Mars 2020 team has also rolled out and received data from the rover’s visible and infrared sensor, one of the SuperCam sensors. This instrument gathers reflected sunlight, exposing the mineral content of rocks and sediments.
SuperCam’s Raman spectrometer is also producing data, an achievement that now represents the first time that spectroscopy has been done somewhere other than Earth, Olivier Beyssac, CNRS research director at the Institute of Mineralogy, Materials Physics and Cosmochemistry in Paris, pointed out in the NASA statement. Raman spectroscopy works by shooting light—specifically green laser beams—at a target object, like a rock. This non-destructive technique shows how light is interacting with chemical bonds in the target, providing information about the object’s chemical structure, internal levels of stress, and other information.
“Raman spectroscopy is going to play a crucial role in characterizing minerals to gain deeper insight into the geological conditions under which they formed and to detect potential organic and mineral molecules that might have been formed by living organisms,” said Beyssac.
Looking ahead, the Mars 2020 team will continue to test the rover’s driving capabilities (it’s already clocked 21.3 feet [6.5 meters]), and choose an aerial field from which to deploy the Ingenuity helicopter.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has posted an interactive 360-degree view of the Perseverance landing site on Mars in 4K resolution. It’s the latest jaw-dropping imagery to return from the mission, including that incredible video of the rover plunging through the Martian atmosphere before being “skycraned” down to the surface of the red planet.
The 60-second video was captured by Perseverance’s color Navcams perched atop a sensing mast above the rover. The 360-degree scene can be navigated in a browser or in the YouTube app on your phone or 4K smart television. The images were captured on February 20th, two days after the Perseverance landed in the Jezero Crater.
Perseverance has a total of 23 cameras, the most of any Mars rover to date: 16 for engineering and science and another seven that recorded those dramatic images of entry, decent, and landing. Audio captured at the landing site by Perseverance’s microphones has also been posted to NASA’s Soundcloud account.
NASA’s Perseverance mission has already made public a total of 4,796 raw images to date. Perseverance is capable of transmitting data at rates up to 2Mbps to the orbiters overhead. The Mars orbiters then relay the data back to Earth using their much larger antennas and more powerful transmitters. The video of the vehicle descending down to the surface amounted to about 30GB of images stitched together.
The Perseverance rover is designed to seek signs of life and better understand the ancient geology of Mars. It will spend at least one Mars year (two Earth years) exploring the area around the landing site.
Landing on Mars is hard. So you’ll want to watch tomorrow when Perseverance (formerly called Mars 2020) hopefully becomes the first artificial object to land on the red planet since the Insight Mars lander in 2018. It’ll be the first rover since Curiosity touched down in 2012. Due to land in the Jezero Crater, just north of Mars’ equator, Perseverance carries a slew of science instruments to collect soil samples and search for signs of ancient life. It’s equipped with advanced audiovisual technology to let us see and hear – for the first time ever – what it’s like to touch down on another world. It’ll be exciting! NASA TV’s live coverage of the event will begin tomorrow, February 18, at 2:15 p.m. EST (19:15 UTC); the landing will take place at approximately 3:55 p.m. EST (20:55 UTC).
Where to watch: NASA TV, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitch, Daily Motion, and THETA.TV.
The 2021 lunar calendars are here. A few left. Order yours before they’re gone!
Innovative cameras and microphones on Perseverance will capture much of its pivotal entry, descent, and landing process. This process, sometimes referred to by space engineers as seven minutes of terror, is considered by many to be the most critical and dangerous part of the mission.
According to NASA, engineers expect to receive notice of key milestones for landing at the estimated times below. Because of the distance the signals have to travel from Mars to Earth, these events actually take place on Mars 11 minutes, 22 seconds earlier than what’s noted below. Also, a variety of factors can affect the precise timing of these milestones listed above, including properties of the Martian atmosphere that are hard to predict until the spacecraft actually flies through it.
– Cruise stage separation: The part of the spacecraft that has been flying Perseverance – with NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter attached to its belly – through space for the last 6 1/2 months will separate from the entry capsule at about 3:38 p.m. EST (12:38 p.m. PST, 20:38 UTC).
– Atmospheric entry: The spacecraft is expected to hit the top of the Martian atmosphere traveling at about 12,100 mph (19,500 kph) at 3:48 p.m. EST (12:48 p.m. PST, 20:48 UTC).
– Peak heating: Friction from the atmosphere will heat up the bottom of the spacecraft to temperatures as high as about 2,370 degrees Fahrenheit (about 1,300 degrees Celsius) at 3:49 p.m. EST (12:49 p.m. PST, 20:49 UTC).
– Parachute deployment: The spacecraft will deploy its parachute at supersonic speed at around 3:52 p.m. EST (12:52 p.m. PST, 20:52 UTC). The exact deployment time is based on the new Range Trigger technology, which improves the precision of the spacecraft’s ability to hit a landing target.
– Heat shield separation: The protective bottom of the entry capsule will detach about 20 seconds after the parachute deployment. This allows the rover to use a radar to determine how far it is from the ground and employ its Terrain-Relative Navigation technology to find a safe landing site.
– Back shell separation: The back half of the entry capsule that is fastened to the parachute will separate from the rover and its “jetpack” (known as the descent stage) at 3:54 p.m. EST (12:54 p.m. PST, 20:54 UTC). The jetpack will use retrorockets to slow down and fly to the landing site.
– Touchdown: The spacecraft’s descent stage, using the sky crane maneuver, will lower the rover down to the surface on nylon tethers. The rover is expected to touch down on the surface of Mars at human walking speed (about 1.7 mph, or 2.7 kph) at around 3:55 p.m. EST (12:55 p.m. PST, 20:55 UTC).
The aeroshell containing NASA’s Perseverance rover guides itself towards the Martian surface as it descends through the atmosphere in this illustration. Hundreds of critical events must execute perfectly and exactly on time for the rover to land on Mars safely. Image via NASA/ JPL-Caltech.
The rover will hit the Martian atmosphere traveling at almost 12,000 miles per hour (19,000 kmh), streaking across the sky as its protective heat shield helps to slow it down. Then, at an altitude of about 1 mile (1.5 km), the descent module will fire its engines, while a new terrain relative navigation system will kick in to identify a safe landing spot. Essentially, it will scan and analyze the terrain below, then match it up with maps in its database and prepare for touchdown.
A 70-foot (21 m) diameter parachute will deploy to slow the craft further, bringing its descent to a crawl, before the sky crane begins its task of lowering the rover the rest of the way to the ground. The sky crane is the same hovering-landing system used by Curiosity, and is a completely autonomous system designed to give rovers a soft, gentle landing (hopefully).
Design-wise, the rover is very similar to the Curiosity rover, currently in Gale Crater, but has some different science instruments. While Curiosity focuses on finding evidence of past habitability, which it has done, Perseverance is looking for direct evidence of life itself. This will be the first mission since the Viking 1 and 2 landers in the late 1970s/early 1980s to do so.
Perseverance’s flashy new cameras will capture much of this entire process. A camera mounted on the back shell of the spacecraft is pointed upward. That will record a view of the parachutes deploying as it slows to land. Then, beneath it is a downward-pointing camera on the descent stage, which will film its first touch-contact with the ground on Mars. This suite of technology will provide us with the most detailed video and photo records of landing on a neighboring world yet. Lori Glaze, who heads the Planetary Science Division of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, told reporters:
We’re going to be able to watch ourselves land for the first time on another planet.
There won’t, however, be a livestream of the footage, as we’re accustomed to with International Space Station events and rocket launches from Earth. The reason for this is due to a lag in data relay from Mars to Earth, which is slower than even old dial-up connections. But we may get a glimpse of Perseverance on the ground using the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which can share at least low-resolution images with us shortly after landing. Moreover, we will also have live feeds from mission control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Footage from the Curiosity landing has left us with some iconic images (enter Bobak Ferdowsi). Of course, coronavirus protocols will still be in effect at mission control, but it’s unlikely that even a pandemic will dampen the celebration. Perseverance deputy project manager Matt Wallace said:
I don’t think that Covid is going to be able to stop us from jumping up and down and fist bumping. You’re going to see a lot of happy people no matter what, once we get this thing on the surface safely.
Researchers in NASA-JPL’s main mission control, celebrating Curiosity’s 2012 landing. Image via NASA/ Daily Mail.
To date, there’ve been only eight successful Mars landings: Viking 1 and Viking 2 (both 1976), Pathfinder (1997), Spirit and Opportunity (both 2004), Phoenix (2008), Curiosity (2012) and InSight (2018).
The Soviet Union is the only other country to land a spacecraft on Mars successfully. That was in 1971 and 1973.
On the other hand, once they get there, Mars missions may last for years, and robot rovers from Earth have spent years rolling around Mars. With the Perseverance mission, for the first time ever, NASA will try something new; it’ll release a small helicopter into the thin Martian air. The helicopter is called Ingenuity. It’ll attempt to scout around the small planet, trying to target locations of interest for future Mars missions.
NASA chose Jezero Crater as the landing site for the Perseverance rover with good reason. Scientists believe the area was once flooded and home to an ancient water river delta more than 3.5 billion years ago. River channels spilled over the crater wall and created a lake, carrying clay minerals from its surroundings. Microbial life could have lived in the crater during one or more of these wet periods, and if so, signs of their remains might be found in lakebed or shoreline sediments. Scientists will study how the region formed and evolved, seek signs of past life, and collect samples of Mars rock and soil that might preserve these signs. The process of landing site selection involved mission team members and scientists from around the world, who carefully examined more than 60 candidate locations. But after the exhaustive five-year study of potential sites, each with its own unique characteristics and appeal, Jezero rose to the top.
In preparation for Perseverance’s landing, NASA is offering landing resources, ways to participate, social opportunities, and more. Download posters, stickers, fact sheets, mission patches, and more. Register for a virtual landing event, where you can connect online with other space enthusiasts and ask NASA experts your most burning questions. Get lessons and activities for students, or even stamps for virtual passports, all available via their website here.
NASA will use a “sky crane” to gently lower Perseverance to the surface of Mars. Artist’s concept via NASA.
Bottom line: Due to land in the Jezero Crater tomorrow, NASA’s Perseverance rover will carry science instruments to collect soil samples and look for signs of ancient life. It will also use audiovisual technology to let us see and hear what it’s like to touch down on another world for the first time ever. How to watch live coverage of the Perseverance landing.
Read more from CNET: NASA Mars Perseverance rover: What to expect on landing day
Hot Wheels Perseverance lands in stores ahead of rover on Mars