- 3058 - PERSEVERANCE - Mars gives us more to learn? As we begin to understand the most ancient history of Mars, researchers are ready to directly search of any signatures that life might have once existed on ancient Mars.
--------------- 3058 - PERSEVERANCE - Mars gives us more to learn?
- The name “Perseverance” was chosen by a seventh grader who won nationwide naming contest. Perseverance needed to take off within the launch window of July 30-August 15, otherwise, NASA would have to wait until September 2022 to try again.
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- The launch to Mars was dependant on planetary alignment between Earth and Mars, which takes place during three crucial weeks every 26 months.
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- Perseverance made the 64-million-mile journey to Mars in about six months landing on the Red Planet February 2021.
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- NASA previously sent three rovers to Mars, Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity, which landed on Mars in 2012 and is still roaming the Red Planet today.
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- Perseverance landed in the Jezero Crater, a 500-meter-deep crater located in a basin slightly north of the Martian equator. The crater once housed a lake estimated to have dried out 3,500,000,000 years ago. It is the ideal location for Perseverance to hunt for signs of past microbial life.
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- The mission will test out conditions for possible human exploration of Mars by trialing a method of producing oxygen from the Martian atmosphere, characterizing environmental conditions such as water and dust on Mars, and looking for resources.
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- It takes14 minutes for the team in San Diego to send and receive a signal from the rover on Mars, considering there's a lag since Mars is millions of miles away. Communication with Perseverance use the Deep Space Network, a global network of antennas that were built in the 1960's.
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- The rover will collect at least 20 samples from Mars using a handy drill, literally attached to the robot's arm. The rock samples will be stored away in tubes in a well-identified place on the Martian surface, and left there to be returned to Earth by a future sample return mission to the Red Planet.
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- The Ingenuity helicopter will hitch a ride with the rover, and allow NASA to test out its ability to fly a helicopter on a planet other than Earth for the first time.
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- The team behind Perseverance redesigned its wheels, giving the rover narrower wheels than its predecessor Curiosity, but bigger in diameter and made of thicker aluminum in order to handle the wear and tear of driving around the Martian terrain.
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- Perseverance’s instruments S.H.E.R.L.O.C., (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals) and WATSON, Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering instrument, will look for microscopic clues in Martian rock.
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- Perseverance has 23 cameras, more cameras than any other interplanetary mission in history.
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- The names of 10,932,295 people were etched onto Perseverance as part of NASA's "Send Your Name to Mars" campaign. Perseverance rover is set to spend at least one Martian year on the planet, the equivalent of 687 days on Earth.
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- A microphone on the rover also has provided the first audio recording of sounds from Mars.
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- From the moment of parachute inflation, the camera system covered the entirety of the descent process, showing some of the rover's intense ride to Mars' Jezero Crater. The footage from high-definition cameras aboard the spacecraft starts 7 miles above the surface, showing the supersonic deployment of the most massive parachute ever sent to another world, and ends with the rover's touchdown in the crater.
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- The six-wheeled robotic astrobiologist, the fifth rover the agency has landed on Mars, currently ( February 2021) is undergoing an extensive checkout of all its systems and instruments.
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- The world's most intimate view of a Mars landing began 230 seconds after the spacecraft entered the Red Planet's upper atmosphere at 12,500 mph. The video opens in black, with the camera lens still covered within the parachute compartment.
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- Within less than a second, the spacecraft's parachute deploys and transforms from a compressed 18-by-26 inch cylinder of nylon, Technora, and Kevlar into a fully inflated 70.5-foot-wide canopy. The tens of thousands of pounds of force that the parachute generates in such a short period stresses both the parachute and the vehicle.
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- The video captures the heat shield dropping away after protecting Perseverance from scorching temperatures during its entry into the Martian atmosphere. The downward view from the rover sways gently like a pendulum as the descent stage, with Perseverance attached, hangs from the back shell and parachute.
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- The Martian landscape quickly pitches as the descent stage, the rover's free-flying "jetpack," which decelerates using rocket engines and then lowers the rover on cables to the surface breaks free, its eight thrusters engaging to put distance between it and the now-discarded back shell and the parachute.
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- Then, 80 seconds and 7,000 feet (2,130 meters) later, the cameras capture the descent stage performing the sky crane maneuver over the landing site, the plume of its rocket engines kicking up dust and small rocks that have likely been in place for billions of years.
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- The EDL camera system not only provided for the opportunity to gain a better understanding the spacecraft's performance during entry, descent, and landing, but also to take the public along for the ride of a lifetime landing on the surface of Mars.
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- The footage ends with Perseverance's aluminum wheels making contact with the surface at 1.61 mph, and then pyrotechnically fired blades sever the cables connecting it to the still-hovering descent stage. The descent stage then climbs and accelerates away in the preplanned flyaway maneuver.
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- Five commercial off-the-shelf cameras located on three different spacecraft components collected the imagery. Two cameras on the back shell, which encapsulated the rover on its journey, took pictures of the parachute inflating. A camera on the descent stage provided a downward view, including the top of the rover, while two on the rover chassis offered both upward and downward perspectives.
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- February, 2021, the rover team continues its initial inspection of Perseverance's systems and its immediate surroundings. The team will check out five of the rover's seven instruments and take the first weather observations with the Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer instrument.
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- A 360-degree panorama of Jezero by the Mastcam-Z should be transmitted down, providing the highest resolution look at the road ahead.
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- A key objective of 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.
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- 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.
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- Jet Propulsions Laboratories, JPL, manages the mission for NASA from Caltech in Pasadena, California.
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- Both Earth and Mars currently have oxidising atmospheres, which is why iron-rich materials in daily life develop rust (a common name for iron oxide) during the oxidation reaction of iron and oxygen. The Earth has had an oxidising atmosphere for approximately 2.5 billion years, but before that, the atmosphere of this planet was reducing, there was no rust.
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- The transition from a reduced planet to an oxidised planet is referred to as the Great Oxidation Event . This transition was a central part of our planet's evolution, and fundamentally linked to the evolution of life here, specifically to the prevalence of photosynthesis that produced oxygen.
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- Planetary geologists have discovered that Mars underwent a great oxygenation event of its own, billions of years ago, then the red planet was not so red.
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- The researchers used infrared remote sensing and spectroscopy to measure the molecular vibration of the material on the Martian surface from orbit, in order to reveal the mineralogy and geochemistry of ancient rocks on Mars.
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- Through detailed comparisons of infrared remote sensing data and data collected in the laboratory here on Earth, the team showed that ancient rocks on Mars exposed at the surface had been weathered under reducing conditions, indicating a reduced atmosphere did exist.
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- Mars is cold and dry now, but 3.5 billion years ago, it was warmer and wetter. It was warm enough to allow the formation of river channels, lakes and minerals that formed by interaction with water.
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- Scientists who have used mathematical models to constrain the conditions of an early Martian atmosphere, have concluded that greenhouse warming occurred, but they also concluded from their models that the greenhouse must have included reduced gases rather than carbon dioxide, implied that a reducing atmosphere might have existed.
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- Infrared remote sensing of Mars, using infrared spectroscopy to map minerals in exposed, weathered rock. The work was built on detailed analysis of weathered volcanic rocks in Hainan Island in southwestern China, where thick sequences of basalt, similar to volcanic rocks on Mars occur.
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- The transition from a reducing to oxidising atmosphere on Earth 2.5 billion years ago was only possible because the existence of life, as oxygen is a waste product of metabolic processes like photosynthesis. Without microbes producing oxygen, it would not accumulate in our atmosphere, and we could not be here.
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- This work demonstrates how spectroscopy and remote sensing lead to fundamental discoveries of significant importance for understanding Mars' history, and even our own.
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- As we begin to understand the most ancient history of Mars, researchers are ready to directly search of any signatures that life might have once existed on ancient Mars.
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----------------------- more reviews available:
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- 3054 - PERSEVERANCE - Mars mission with math. The most advanced rover NASA has sent to another world touched down on Mars Thursday, February 18, 2021, after a 203-day journey of 293 million miles.
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- 3056 - PERSEVERANCE - the rover has safely landed. It is the most technologically advanced rover that humans have set on the Mars surface. . The Mars 2020 Mission will use five new technologies to help future missions on Mars, both crewed and uncrewed. Two of these are technology demonstrations.
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- 3023 - MARS - returning rock samples to Earth? - Fundamental questions about Mars remain related to its potential for life; the geological history of the planet; the history of its climate and the driving forces behind these changes; the evolution of geologic processes and the interior composition and structure; and more recent atmospheric, polar, surface, and interior processes
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- 3010 - MARS - Perseverance Mars mission. Scientists unanimously believe that the Mars sample-return program should proceed. They think its scientific value will be extraordinarily high, with the potential for world-changing discoveries about Earth's nearest planetary neighbor, and possibly about an independent origin of life on another world.
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- 2974 - MARS - Perseverance mission in 2021? Space exploration just took the next giant leap in the search for signs of life beyond Earth. On July 30, 2020 NASA launched its most sophisticated and ambitious spacecraft to Mars, the “Perseverance rover“.
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- 2968 - MARS - exploring robot dogs? Will Mars exploration be done by robot dogs? Scientists are equipping four-legged, animal-mimicking robots with artificial intelligence (AI) and an array of sensing equipment to help the robots autonomously navigate treacherous terrain and subsurface caves on the Red Planet.
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- 2963 - MARS - 20 years of exploration. Over the past two decades, missions flown by NASA’s Mars Exploration Program have shown us that Mars was once very different from the cold, dry planet it is today. Evidence discovered by landed and orbital missions point to wet conditions billions of years ago.
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February 23, 2021 PERSEVERANCE - more to learn? 3058
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