Stacking spacecraft components on top of each other is one of the final assembly steps before a mission launches to the Red Planet.
Engineers working on NASA's Perseverance rover mission at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida have begun the process of placing the Mars-bound rover and other spacecraft components into the configuration they'll be in as they ride on top of the United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket. The launch period for the mission opens on July 17 — just 70 days from now.
Called "vehicle stacking," the process began on April 23 with the integration of the rover and its rocket-powered descent stage. One of the first steps in the daylong operation was to lift the descent stage onto Perseverance so that engineers could connect the two with flight-separation bolts. ...
On April 29, the rover and descent stage were attached to the cone-shaped back shell, which contains the parachute and, along with the mission's heat shield, provides protection for the rover and descent stage during Martian atmospheric entry. ...
Know the quiet place within your heart and touch the rainbow of possibility; be
alive to the gentle breeze of communication, and please stop being such a jerk. — Garrison Keillor
Perseverance Goes Through Trials by Fire, Ice, Light and Sound NASA | JPL-Caltech | Perseverance | 2020 May 18
The agency's new Mars rover is put through a series of tests in vacuum chambers, acoustic chambers and more to get ready for the Red Planet.
Click to play embedded YouTube video.
While auto manufacturers built over 92 million motor vehicles for this world in 2019, NASA built just one for Mars. The Perseverance Mars rover is one of a kind, and the testing required to get it ready to roll on the mean (and unpaved) streets of the Red Planet is one of a kind as well.
Because hardware cannot be repaired once the rover is on Mars, the team has to build a vehicle that can survive for years on a planet with punishing temperature shifts, constant radiation and ever-present dust. To ensure readiness, they put Perseverance through a test program tougher than the trip to Mars and the environment it will encounter once there.
"Mars is hard, and everybody knows that," said project manager John McNamee of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. "What they may not realize is that to be successful at Mars, you have to test the absolute heck out of the thing here on Earth." ...
Know the quiet place within your heart and touch the rainbow of possibility; be
alive to the gentle breeze of communication, and please stop being such a jerk. — Garrison Keillor
A NASA Wallops Flight Facility cargo plane transported more than two tons of equipment - including the rover's sample collection tubes - to Florida for this summer's liftoff.
Progress continues to speed along as NASA's Perseverance rover readies for its launch this summer. On May 11, the rover team at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida received the tubes tasked with holding the first samples collected at Mars for eventual return to Earth. A week later, the Atlas V launch vehicle that will hurl Perseverance to the Red Planet arrived at the launch site. Working together, personnel from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and United Launch Alliance in Centennial, Colorado, were also able to extend the rover's launch period by six days, from Jul. 17-Aug. 5 to Jul. 17-Aug. 11.
The sample tubes will be filled with Martian rock and sediment and deposited on the planet for a future mission to return to Earth to be studied. They're part of the rover's Sample Caching System, the most complex and capable mechanism of its kind to be sent into space to address the question of potential life beyond Earth.
The tubes and their seals were among the nearly 5,000 pounds (2,270 kilograms) of mission flight hardware, test gear and equipment that traveled from JPL to NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center in Palmdale, California. On May 10, the equipment was loaded onto a C-130 cargo plane from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. The following day, the crew set out for Florida, touching down on Kennedy Space Center's Launch and Landing Facility a little before 3 p.m. local time. They were back at Wallops that evening.
A week later, on May 18, a giant Antonov cargo plane delivered the first stage of the mission's Atlas V launch vehicle, arriving at Kennedy Space Center just after 4 p.m. local time. The following day the booster was transported to the Atlas Spaceflight Operations Center at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
Once final testing is complete, the Atlas will be moved to the Vertical Integration Facility at Space Launch Complex 41, where preparations for the launch of Perseverance have begun following the successful Atlas V launch of the USSF-7 mission on May 17. Next, the Centaur upper stage and the payload fairing, which protects the spacecraft during launch, will be stacked on top of it. ...
Know the quiet place within your heart and touch the rainbow of possibility; be
alive to the gentle breeze of communication, and please stop being such a jerk. — Garrison Keillor
Mars is a long way from 221B Baker Street, but one of fiction's best-known detectives will be represented on the Red Planet after NASA's Perseverance rover touches down on Feb. 18, 2021. SHERLOC, an instrument on the end of the rover's robotic arm, will hunt for sand-grain-sized clues in Martian rocks while working in tandem with WATSON, a camera that will take close-up pictures of rock textures. Together, they will study rock surfaces, mapping out the presence of certain minerals and organic molecules, which are the carbon-based building blocks of life on Earth.
SHERLOC was built at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which leads the Perseverance mission; WATSON was built at Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego. For the most promising rocks, the Perseverance team will command the rover to take half-inch-wide core samples, store and seal them in metal tubes, and deposit them on the surface of Mars so that a future mission can return them to Earth for more detailed study.
SHERLOC will be working with six other instruments aboard Perseverance to give us a clearer understanding of Mars. It's even helping the effort to create spacesuits that will hold up in the Martian environment when humans set foot on the Red Planet. ...
SHERLOC's full name is a mouthful: Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals. "Raman" refers to Raman spectroscopy, a scientific technique named after the Indian physicist C.V. Raman, who discovered the light-scattering effect in the 1920s. ...
Know the quiet place within your heart and touch the rainbow of possibility; be
alive to the gentle breeze of communication, and please stop being such a jerk. — Garrison Keillor
The first samples from the Moon were collected by two astronauts. The first samples
collected for eventual return to Earth from Mars will take three robots aboard the
Perseverance rover working as one. Together, they make up the mission's Sample
Caching System detailed in this video. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The samples Apollo 11 brought back to Earth from the Moon were humanity's first from another celestial body. NASA's upcoming Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission will collect the first samples from another planet (the red one) for return to Earth by subsequent missions. In place of astronauts, the Perseverance rover will rely on the most complex, capable and cleanest mechanism ever to be sent into space, the Sample Caching System.
The final 39 of the 43 sample tubes at the heart of the sample system were loaded, along with the storage assembly that will hold them, aboard NASA's Perseverance rover on May 20 at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. (The other four tubes had already been loaded into different locations in the Sample Caching System.) The integration of the final tubes marks another key step in preparation for the opening of the rover's launch period on July 17. ...
While many people think of the Perseverance rover as one robot, it's actually akin to a collection of robots working together. Located on the front of the Perseverance rover, the Sample Caching System itself is composed of three robots, the most visible being the rover's 7-foot-long (2-meter-long) robotic arm. Bolted to the front of the rover's chassis, the five-jointed arm carries a large turret that includes a rotary percussive drill to collect core samples of Mars rock and regolith (broken rock and dust).
The second robot looks like a small flying saucer built into the front of the rover. Called the bit carousel, this appliance is the ultimate middleman for all Mars sample transactions: It will provide drill bits and empty sample tubes to the drill and will later move the sample-filled tubes into the rover chassis for assessment and processing.
The third robot in the Sample Caching System is the 1.6-foot-long (0.5 meter-long) sample handling arm (known by the team as the "T. rex arm"). Located in the belly of the rover, it picks up where the bit carousel leaves off, moving sample tubes between storage and documentation stations as well as the bit carousel. ...
Know the quiet place within your heart and touch the rainbow of possibility; be
alive to the gentle breeze of communication, and please stop being such a jerk. — Garrison Keillor
The Red Planet's surface has been visited by eight NASA spacecraft. The ninth will be the first that includes gathering Mars samples for future return to Earth
Click to play embedded YouTube video.
Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover – Countdown to Mars
NASA's Perseverance Mars rover is just over a month from its July 20 targeted launch date. The rover's astrobiology mission will seek signs of past microscopic life on Mars, explore the geology of the Jezero Crater landing site, and demonstrate key technologies to help prepare for future robotic and human exploration. And the rover will do all that while collecting the first samples of Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust) for return to Earth by a set of future missions.
"Fifty-one years ago today, NASA was deep into final preparations for the first Moon landing," said NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine. "Today we stand at the threshold of another monumental moment in exploration: sample collection at Mars. As we celebrate the heroes of Apollo 11 today, future generations may well recognize the women and men of Perseverance — not only for what they will achieve 100 million miles from home, but for what they were able to accomplish on this world on the road to launch."
The Mars 2020 mission has been slated to liftoff this summer ever since the agency announced the project in December 2012. Owing to the relative positions of Earth and Mars to each other, launch opportunities come up only every 26 months. If Perseverance didn't head to Mars this summer, the project would have to wait until September 2022 to try again, seriously impacting the long-term objectives of NASA's Mars Exploration Program and increasing overall mission risk. ...
Know the quiet place within your heart and touch the rainbow of possibility; be
alive to the gentle breeze of communication, and please stop being such a jerk. — Garrison Keillor
The small craft will seek to prove that powered, controlled flight is possible on another planet. But just getting it onto the surface of Mars will take a whole lot of ingenuity.
Click to play embedded YouTube video.
Testing the Mars Helicopter Delivery System on Perseverance Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Lockheed Martin Space
NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter will travel with the Perseverance rover through 314 million miles (505 million kilometers) of interplanetary space to get to Mars. But for the team working on the first experimental flight test on another planet, engineering the final 5 inches (13 centimeters) of the journey has been among the most challenging of all. To safely navigate those 5 inches — the distance Ingenuity will travel from where it's stowed on the rover to the surface of Mars — they came up with the ingenious Mars Helicopter Delivery System. ...
Ingenuity's square fuselage (which houses computers, cameras, batteries and the like) is about the size of a softball (7.9 by 6.3 by 5.5 inches, or 20 by 16 by 14 centimeters). But if you look outside the box, you'll find plenty of other important stuff — including an antenna, solar panel, landing legs and two rotors measuring 4 feet (1.2 meters) across — that makes stowing and deploying the helicopter a challenge. The entire package tips the scales at about 4 pounds (2 kilograms). ...
Mission engineers considered every available parking space on the rover chassis for their unusual addition, including the robotic arm. They eventually landed on Perseverance's belly, which on a relatively flat stretch of Red Planet surface should offer about 26 inches (67 centimeters) of ground clearance. While that may seem like a lot of room (an Earthly SUV provides about a third of that), the delivery system reduces that distance by about 2 inches (6 centimeters). Ingenuity is about 19 inches (49 centimeters) tall. This is where the 5-inch journey comes in. ...
Know the quiet place within your heart and touch the rainbow of possibility; be
alive to the gentle breeze of communication, and please stop being such a jerk. — Garrison Keillor
<<The earliest references for vertical flight came from China. Since around 400 BC, Chinese children have played with bamboo flying toys (or Chinese top). This bamboo-copter is spun by rolling a stick attached to a rotor. The spinning creates lift, and the toy flies when released. Designs similar to the Chinese helicopter toy appeared in some Renaissance paintings and other works. In the 18th and early 19th centuries Western scientists developed flying machines based on the Chinese toy.
It was not until the early 1480s, when Italian polymath Leonardo da Vinci created a design for a machine that could be described as an "aerial screw", that any recorded advancement was made towards vertical flight. His notes suggested that he built small flying models, but there were no indications for any provision to stop the rotor from making the craft rotate. As scientific knowledge increased and became more accepted, people continued to pursue the idea of vertical flight.
In July 1754, Russian Mikhail Lomonosov had developed a small coaxial modeled after the Chinese top but powered by a wound-up spring device and demonstrated it to the Russian Academy of Sciences. It was powered by a spring, and was suggested as a method to lift meteorological instruments. In 1783, Christian de Launoy, and his mechanic, Bienvenu, used a coaxial version of the Chinese top in a model consisting of contrarotating turkey flight feathers as rotor blades, and in 1784, demonstrated it to the French Academy of Sciences. Sir George Cayley, influenced by a childhood fascination with the Chinese flying top, developed a model of feathers, similar to that of Launoy and Bienvenu, but powered by rubber bands. By the end of the century, he had progressed to using sheets of tin for rotor blades and springs for power. His writings on his experiments and models would become influential on future aviation pioneers. Alphonse Pénaud would later develop coaxial rotor model helicopter toys in 1870, also powered by rubber bands. One of these toys, given as a gift by their father, would inspire the Wright brothers to pursue the dream of flight.
In 1861, the word "helicopter" was coined by Gustave de Ponton d'Amécourt, a French inventor who demonstrated a small steam-powered model. While celebrated as an innovative use of a new metal, aluminum, the model never lifted off the ground. D'Amecourt's linguistic contribution would survive to eventually describe the vertical flight he had envisioned. Steam power was popular with other inventors as well. In 1878 the Italian Enrico Forlanini's unmanned vehicle, also powered by a steam engine, rose to a height of 12 meters, where it hovered for some 20 seconds after a vertical take-off. Emmanuel Dieuaide's steam-powered design featured counter-rotating rotors powered through a hose from a boiler on the ground. In 1887 Parisian inventor, Gustave Trouvé, built and flew a tethered electric model helicopter.
In July 1901, the maiden flight of Hermann Ganswindt's helicopter took place in Berlin-Schöneberg; this was probably the first heavier-than-air motor-driven flight carrying humans. A movie covering the event was taken by Max Skladanowsky, but it remains lost.
In 1885, Thomas Edison was given US$1,000 (equivalent to $28,000 today) by James Gordon Bennett, Jr., to conduct experiments towards developing flight. Edison built a helicopter and used the paper for a stock ticker to create guncotton, with which he attempted to power an internal combustion engine. The helicopter was damaged by explosions and one of his workers was badly burned. Edison reported that it would take a motor with a ratio of three to four pounds per horsepower produced to be successful, based on his experiments. Ján Bahýľ, a Slovak inventor, adapted the internal combustion engine to power his helicopter model that reached a height of 0.5 meters in 1901. On 5 May 1905, his helicopter reached 4 meters in altitude and flew for over 1,500 meters. In 1908, Edison patented his own design for a helicopter powered by a gasoline engine with box kites attached to a mast by cables for a rotor, but it never flew.>>
NASA's next rover to the Red Planet is slated to launch no earlier than July 30. These highlights will get you up to speed on the ambitious mission.
In less than a month, NASA expects to launch the Mars 2020 Perseverance mission from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Loaded with scientific instruments, advanced computational capabilities for landing, and other new systems, the Perseverance rover is the largest, heaviest, most sophisticated vehicle NASA has ever sent to the Red Planet.
"Perseverance sets a new bar for our ambitions at Mars," said Lori Glaze, planetary science director at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "We will get closer than ever before to answering some of science's longest-standing questions about the Red Planet, including whether life ever arose there."
What drives Perseverance's mission and what will it do at the Red Planet? Here are seven things to know:
The Perseverance rover draws on the NASA – and scientific – spirit of overcoming challenges. ...
Perseverance builds on the lessons of other Mars rovers. ...
The rover will be landing in a place with high potential for finding signs of past microbial life. ...
Perseverance will also be collecting important data about Mars' geology and climate. ...
Perseverance is the first leg of a round trip to Mars. ...
Perseverance carries instruments and technology that will pave the way for human missions to the Moon and Mars. ...
You will get to ride along. ...
Know the quiet place within your heart and touch the rainbow of possibility; be
alive to the gentle breeze of communication, and please stop being such a jerk. — Garrison Keillor
NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has been attached to the top of the rocket that will send it toward the Red Planet this summer. Encased in the nose cone that will protect it during launch, the rover and the rest of the Mars 2020 spacecraft – the aeroshell, cruise stage, and descent stage – were affixed to a United Launch Alliance Atlas V booster on Tuesday, July 7, at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Central Florida.
The process began when a 60-ton hoist on the roof of the Vertical Integration Facility at Space Launch Complex 41 lifted the nose cone, otherwise known as the payload fairing, 129 feet (39 meters) to the top of the waiting rocket. There, engineers made the physical and electrical connections that will remain between booster and spacecraft until about 50 to 60 minutes after launch, when the two are pyrotechnically separated and Perseverance is on its way. ...
With the mating of spacecraft and booster complete, the final testing of the two (separately and as one unit) will be underway. Then two days before the July 30 launch, the Atlas V will leave the Vertical Integration Facility for good. Traveling by rail, it will cover the 1,800 feet (550 meters) to the launch pad in about 40 minutes. From there, Perseverance has about seven months and 290 million miles (467 million kilometers) to go before arriving at Mars.
NASA and United Launch Alliance recently updated the mission's launch period – the range of days the rocket can launch in order to reach Mars. It now spans from July 30 to Aug. 15. ...
Know the quiet place within your heart and touch the rainbow of possibility; be
alive to the gentle breeze of communication, and please stop being such a jerk. — Garrison Keillor
The first helicopter attempting to fly on another planet is a marvel of engineering. Get up to speed with these key facts about its plans.
When NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover launches from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida later this summer, an innovative experiment will ride along: the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter. Ingenuity may weigh only about 4 pounds (1.8 kilograms), but it has some outsize ambitions.
"The Wright Brothers showed that powered flight in Earth's atmosphere was possible, using an experimental aircraft," said Håvard Grip, Ingenuity’s chief pilot at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. "With Ingenuity, we're trying to do the same for Mars."
Here are six things you should know about the first helicopter going to another planet:
Ingenuity is a flight test. ...
Ingenuity will be the first aircraft to attempt controlled flight on another planet. ...
Ingenuity is a fitting name for a robot that is the result of extreme creativity. ...
Ingenuity has already demonstrated feats of engineering. ...
The Ingenuity team will count success one step at a time. ...
If Ingenuity succeeds, future Mars exploration could include an ambitious aerial dimension. ...
Know the quiet place within your heart and touch the rainbow of possibility; be
alive to the gentle breeze of communication, and please stop being such a jerk. — Garrison Keillor
If you could stand on the surface of Mars, what would you hear? While 8 missions have returned stunning views from the surface of the Red Planet, none have returned any sound.
That’s about to change. NASA’s Perseverance rover, which is days away from blasting off on a mission to search for signs of past life and collect samples for future return to Earth, will have not one, but two microphones aboard. One will listen as the rover plummets through the Martian atmosphere for landing, and another will record sounds as the rover does its scientific work in Jezero Crater—an ancient river delta where life may have flourished.
If all goes well, Perseverance’s microphones will fulfill the wishes of Planetary Society co-founder Carl Sagan, who wrote a letter to NASA in 1996 urging the space agency to send a microphone to Mars. ...
At least 3 Mars missions prior to Perseverance have had microphones as part of their design. The first, which flew to Mars in 1999 aboard NASA’s Mars Polar Lander, was sponsored by The Planetary Society, and became the first crowdfunded science instrument to fly to another planet. The Polar Lander crashed on the surface, but more attempts would follow. However, so far, none have succeeded. ...
Of Perseverance’s two microphones, one is part of the Entry, Descent and Landing (EDL) system responsible for safely bringing the rover through Mars’ atmosphere to the surface. The audio from that microphone will be paired with full-color video taken by EDL cameras. This will allow viewers to experience what landing on Mars looks and sounds like for the very first time.
The second microphone is included in the rover’s SuperCam science instrument, a next-generation version of the Curiosity rover's laser-zapping ChemCam. Like its predecessor, SuperCam uses an infrared laser beam to heat and vaporize rocks and the Martian soil. A special camera can then determine the chemical makeup of the vaporized materials, and detect the presence of any organic compounds—a wide variety of carbon-based compounds that make up the proteins for life as we know it. ...
Know the quiet place within your heart and touch the rainbow of possibility; be
alive to the gentle breeze of communication, and please stop being such a jerk. — Garrison Keillor
In February 2020, NASA’s Perseverance Rover began its long journey to Mars by first
traveling across the United States. The rover was built at NASA’s Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in Southern California and then carefully packed and flown to NASA’s
Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. There, engineers integrated the
rover with the spacecraft that carries it to Mars, and the Atlas V rocket chosen to
send it on its way. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission cleared its Flight Readiness Review Wednesday, an important milestone on its way to the launch pad. The meeting was an opportunity for the Mars 2020 team and launch vehicle provider United Launch Alliance to report on the readiness of the spacecraft, along with the Atlas V rocket, flight and ground hardware, software, personnel, and procedures. The daily launch window on Thursday, July 30, opens at 7:50 a.m. EDT. ...
With all the connections between the spacecraft and Atlas V launch vehicle complete, the majority of business remaining for Mars 2020's Assembly, Test, and Launch Operations (ATLO) team involves checking out every one of the multitude of systems and subsystems onboard the rover, aeroshell, cruise stage, and descent stage. ...
The spacecraft and launch teams have one more major review to complete. Scheduled Monday, July 27, the Launch Readiness Review is the last significant checkup before the mission receives final approval to proceed with launch. ...
Know the quiet place within your heart and touch the rainbow of possibility; be
alive to the gentle breeze of communication, and please stop being such a jerk. — Garrison Keillor
With Perseverance, its most complex Mars rover to date, NASA is opening a new chapter in the search for traces of ancient life on Mars. The launch of the new rover is scheduled to take place on 30 July 2020 at 13:50 CEST on board an Atlas V launch vehicle from Cape Canaveral in Florida. Then, on 18 February 2021 it will land in Mars’ Jezero crater. The German Aerospace Center (DLR) is represented on the Mars 2020 mission science team and is involved in evaluating the data and images. The aim of the mission is to use analyse rock and sediment samples to determine more precisely when Mars may have had ideal conditions for microorganisms to thrive.
When the Perseverance rover lands on Mars in 2021, it will be carrying containers for sample collection. These containers will be filled with drill cores from depths of up to a few centimetres and left on Mars for later return to Earth. The samples will then be transported to Earth by several follow-up missions scheduled to begin in the early 2030s. The rover, which is the size of a small car and has a mass of 1025 kilograms, carries a total of seven scientific instruments, with which it will analyse the geology of the landing site, search for signs of past microbial life in rocks and sediments, and find the most promising samples for subsequent analysis on Earth. To this end, the Mars 2020 mission is carrying another first: a small, 1.8-kilogram helicopter for initial test flights over the landing site in the thin Martian atmosphere. ...
Perseverance will land in Jezero Crater, located on the western edge of Isidis Planitia, a giant impact basin just north of the Martian equator at approximately 18 degrees latitude, 77 degrees longitude. Some of the oldest and scientifically most interesting landscapes that Mars has to offer are found west of Isidis. High-resolution digital terrain models derived from data obtained by DLR’s High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft have made a significant contribution to the selection and exploration of the landing site. From them, valuable geological data can be calculated, such as the volume of the crater and the delta, as well as the width, depth and gradient of the river, but also the terrain slope within the landing ellipse -- one of the most important factors in the selection of the landing site.
It is very likely that the 45-kilometre-wide Jezero Crater was home to a lake more than 3.5 billion years ago. The ancient river delta in the western part of the crater, which contains hydrous minerals such as clay, provides clear evidence. This is also where the crater gets its name: ‘Jezero’ means ‘lake’ in several Slavic languages. Scientists believe it is possible that the rivers that flowed into and out of Jezero carried organic molecules, other potential signs of microbial life, or perhaps even microorganisms themselves. Traces of this possible past microbial life could have been preserved in the deposits of the river delta or the lake sediments of Jezero crater and could be found there today. Today, the liquid water on the surface of Mars has disappeared and its atmosphere has thinned to less than one percent of Earth’s atmospheric pressure. ...
Know the quiet place within your heart and touch the rainbow of possibility; be
alive to the gentle breeze of communication, and please stop being such a jerk. — Garrison Keillor
IDAHO FALLS, Idaho (KIFI/KIDK)-An Idaho National Laboratory team is keeping a close eye on the progress of the Perseverance Mars rover scheduled to launch at 5:50 a.m. Thursday.
INL Space Nuclear Power and Isotope Technologies Division Director Steve Johnson traveled to Cape Canaveral, Florida for the launch.
INL’s part in the mission was creation of the Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (MMRTG) that will power the craft. The mission is aimed at finding signs of life and to collect rock and soil samples for potential return to Earth in a future mission.
NASA said the mission is also testing a method for producing oxygen from the Martian atmosphere, identifying other resources, like subsurface water, improving landing techniques and characterizing weather, dust, and other environmental conditions that could affect future astronauts living and working on Mars.
The rover is expected to land on Mars in February 2021.
Perseverance is the latest of several space missions INL has participated in. They include the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity Rover launched in 2011 and Pluto New Horizons launched in 2006. INL will also work on the Dragonfly rotorcraft lander mission to Saturn’s moon Titan, which is scheduled to launch in 2026.
Just as zero is not equal to infinity, everything coming from nothing is illogical.
Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Recharges Its Batteries in Flight NASA | JPL-Caltech | Ingenuity | 2020 Aug 13
Headed to the Red Planet with the Perseverance rover, the pioneering helicopter is powered up for the first time in interplanetary space as part of a systems check.
NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter received a checkout and recharge of its power system on Friday, Aug. 7, one week into its near seven-month journey to Mars with the Perseverance rover. This marks the first time the helicopter has been powered up and its batteries have been charged in the space environment.
During the eight-hour operation, the performance of the rotorcraft's six lithium-ion batteries was analyzed as the team brought their charge level up to 35%. The project has determined a low charge state is optimal for battery health during the cruise to Mars. ...
The 4-pound (2-kilogram) helicopter – a combination of specially designed components and off-the-shelf parts – is currently stowed on Perseverance's belly and receives its charge from the rover's power supply. Once Ingenuity is deployed on Mars' surface after Perseverance touches down, its batteries will be charged solely by the helicopter's own solar panel. If Ingenuity survives the cold Martian nights during its preflight checkout, the team will proceed with testing. ...
The small craft will have a 30-Martian-day (31-Earth-day) experimental flight-test window. If it succeeds, Ingenuity will prove that powered, controlled flight by an aircraft can be achieved at Mars, enabling future Mars missions to potentially add an aerial dimension to their explorations with second-generation rotorcraft. ...
Know the quiet place within your heart and touch the rainbow of possibility; be
alive to the gentle breeze of communication, and please stop being such a jerk. — Garrison Keillor
The sum of the first 23 primes is 874, which is divisible by 23, a property shared by few other numbers.
23 also has the distinction of being one of two integers that cannot be expressed as the sum of fewer than 9 cubes of positive integers (the other is 239). See Waring's problem.
According to the birthday paradox, in a group of 23 (or more) randomly chosen people, the probability is more than 50% that some pair of them will have the same birthday.
23 is the width of the Arecibo message, sent to space in search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
The earth's axis is tilted at approximately 23°
Psalm 23 is possibly the most quoted and best known Psalm.
In Islam, the Qur'an was revealed in a total of 23 years to Prophet Muhammed.
The 23 enigma is a belief in the significance of the number 23.
<<Robert Anton Wilson cites William S. Burroughs as the first person to believe in the 23 enigma. Wilson, in an article in Fortean Times, related the following anecdote:
I first heard of the 23 enigma from William S Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, Nova Express, etc. According to Burroughs, he had known a certain Captain Clark, around 1960 in Tangier, who once bragged that he had been sailing 23 years without an accident. That very day, Clark’s ship had an accident that killed him and everybody else aboard. Furthermore, while Burroughs was thinking about this crude example of the irony of the gods that evening, a bulletin on the radio announced the crash of an airliner in Florida, USA. The pilot was another Captain Clark and the flight was Flight 23.
The 23 enigma can be viewed as an example of apophenia, selection bias, and confirmation bias. In interviews, Wilson acknowledged the self-fulfilling nature of the 23 enigma, implying that the real value of the Law of Fives and the 23 enigma is in their demonstration of the mind's ability to perceive "truth" in nearly anything.
When you start looking for something you tend to find it. This wouldn't be like Simon Newcomb, the great astronomer, who wrote a mathematical proof that heavier than air flight was impossible and published it a day before the Wright brothers took off. I'm talking about people who found a pattern in nature and wrote several scientific articles and got it accepted by a large part of the scientific community before it was generally agreed that there was no such pattern, it was all just selective perception."
The 2007 film The Number 23, starring Jim Carrey, is the story of a man who becomes obsessed with the number 23 while reading a book of the same title that seems to be about his life.
In the Stargate Universe season 1 episode 14, titled “Human”, an imagined Dr. Daniel Jackson refers to the 23 Enigma in conversation with Dr. Nicholas Rush. The number 23 is also referenced in the episode as one half of the number of chromosomes in a human cell – 46, a number which appears frequently in the episode.>>
A crisply rendered web application can show you where the agency's Mars 2020 mission is right now as it makes its way to the Red Planet for a Feb. 18, 2021, landing.
The last time we saw NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission was on July 30, 2020, as it disappeared into the black of deep space on a trajectory for Mars. But with NASA's Eyes on the Solar System, you can follow in real time as humanity's most sophisticated rover – and the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter traveling with it – treks millions of miles over the next six months to Jezero Crater. ...
Eyes doesn't just let you see the distance between the Red Planet and the spacecraft at this very moment. You can also fly formation with Mars 2020 or check the relative velocity between Mars and Earth or, say, the dwarf planet Pluto. ...
Dozens of controls on pop-up menus allow you to customize not just what you see – from faraway to right "on board" a spacecraft – but also how you see it: Choose the 3D mode, and all you need is a pair of red-cyan anaglyph glasses for a more immersive experience. ...
While you're exploring, take a deeper dive into our home planet with Eyes on the Earth and travel to distant worlds with Eyes on ExoPlanets. ...
Know the quiet place within your heart and touch the rainbow of possibility; be
alive to the gentle breeze of communication, and please stop being such a jerk. — Garrison Keillor
NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover has a challenging road ahead: After having to make it through the harrowing entry, descent, and landing phase of the mission on Feb. 18, 2021, it will begin searching for traces of microscopic life from billions of years back. That's why it's packing PIXL, a precision X-ray device powered by artificial intelligence (AI).
Short for Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry, PIXL is a lunchbox-size instrument located on the end of Perseverance's 7-foot-long (2-meter-long) robotic arm. The rover's most important samples will be collected by a coring drill on the end of the arm, then stashed in metal tubes that Perseverance will deposit on the surface for return to Earth by a future mission.
Nearly every mission that has successfully landed on Mars, from the Viking landers to the Curiosity rover, has included an X-ray fluorescence spectrometer of some kind. One major way PIXL differs from its predecessors is in its ability to scan rock using a powerful, finely-focused X-ray beam to discover where - and in what quantity - chemicals are distributed across the surface. ...
Rock textures will be an essential clue when deciding which samples are worth returning to Earth. On our planet, distinctively warped rocks called stromatolites were made from ancient layers of bacteria, and they are just one example of fossilized ancient life that scientists will be looking for. ...
Know the quiet place within your heart and touch the rainbow of possibility; be
alive to the gentle breeze of communication, and please stop being such a jerk. — Garrison Keillor
Perseverance is one of a few Mars spacecraft carrying laser retroreflectors. The devices could provide new science and safer Mars landings in the future.
When the Apollo astronauts landed on the Moon, they brought devices with them called retroreflectors, which are essentially small arrays of mirrors. The plan was for scientists on Earth to aim lasers at them and calculate the time it took for the beams to return. This provided exceptionally precise measurements of the Moon's orbit and shape, including how it changed slightly based on Earth's gravitational pull.
Research with these Apollo-era lunar retroreflectors continues to this day, and scientists want to perform similar experiments on Mars. NASA's Perseverance rover – scheduled to land on the Red Planet on Feb. 18, 2021 – carries the palm-size Laser Retroreflector Array (LaRA). There's also small one aboard the agency's InSight lander, called Laser Retroreflector for InSight (LaRRI). And a retroreflector will be aboard the ESA (European Space Agency) ExoMars rover that launches in 2022.
While there is currently no laser in the works for this sort of Mars research, the devices are geared toward the future: Reflectors like these could one day enable scientists conducting what is called laser-ranging research to measure the position of a rover on the Martian surface, test Einstein's theory of general relativity, and help make future landings on the Red Planet more precise. ...
Know the quiet place within your heart and touch the rainbow of possibility; be
alive to the gentle breeze of communication, and please stop being such a jerk. — Garrison Keillor
After touching down on the Red Planet Feb. 18, 2021, NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover will scour Jezero Crater to help us understand its geologic history and search for signs of past microbial life. But the six-wheeled robot won't be looking just at the surface of Mars: The rover will peer deep below it with a ground-penetrating radar called RIMFAX.
Unlike similar instruments aboard Mars orbiters, which study the planet from space, RIMFAX will be the first ground-penetrating radar set on the surface of Mars. This will give scientists much higher-resolution data than space-borne radars can provide while focusing on the specific areas that Perseverance will explore. Taking a more focused look at this terrain will help the rover's team understand how features in Jezero Crater formed over time.
Short for Radar Imager for Mars' Subsurface Experiment, RIMFAX can provide a highly detailed view of subsurface structures down to at least 30 feet (10 meters) underground. In doing so, the instrument will reveal hidden layers of geology and help find clues to past environments on Mars, especially those that may have provided the conditions necessary for supporting life. ...
Know the quiet place within your heart and touch the rainbow of possibility; be
alive to the gentle breeze of communication, and please stop being such a jerk. — Garrison Keillor
The rover mission is not only to collect the recourse and make exploration from Mars - but it also has to deliver the material from which the astronaut's suit is built in order to check how the Mars atmosphere influences it. Btw, the rover has a microphone so for the first time in space exploration history we can hear Mars
The Mars 2020 Perseverance rover, which has started its approach to the Red Planet, will help answer the next logical question in Mars exploration.
With only about 50 million miles (80 million kilometers) left to go in its 293-million-mile (471-million-kilometer) journey, NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover is nearing its new planetary home. The spacecraft has begun its approach to the Red Planet and in 43 days, on Feb. 18, 2021, Perseverance will blaze through Mars' atmosphere at about 12,100 mph (19,500 kph), touching down gently on the surface about seven minutes later. ...
Built and managed by JPL for NASA, Perseverance will be joining another rover and lander currently at work on Mars, with several orbiters in the skies above. What sets this six-wheeled robot apart?
Perseverance is searching for signs of ancient life. ...
Perseverance is landing in a place with a high potential for finding these signs of past microbial life. ...
Perseverance is also collecting important data about Mars' geology and climate. ...
Perseverance is the first leg of a round trip to Mars. ...
Perseverance carries instruments and technology that will help pave the way for human missions to the Moon and Mars. ...
Perseverance embodies the NASA – and the scientific – spirit of overcoming challenges. ...
You will get to ride along. ...
Know the quiet place within your heart and touch the rainbow of possibility; be
alive to the gentle breeze of communication, and please stop being such a jerk. — Garrison Keillor
Ingenuity, a technology experiment, is preparing to attempt the first powered, controlled flight on the Red Planet.
When NASA’s Perseverance rover lands on Mars on Feb. 18, 2021, it will be carrying a small but mighty passenger: Ingenuity, the Mars Helicopter.
The helicopter, which weighs about 4 pounds (1.8 kilograms) on Earth and has a fuselage about the size of a tissue box, started out six years ago as an implausible prospect. Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California knew it was theoretically possible to fly in Mars’ thin atmosphere, but no one was sure whether they could build a vehicle powerful enough to fly, communicate, and survive autonomously with the extreme restrictions on its mass.
Then the team had to prove in Earthbound tests that it could fly in a Mars-like environment. Now that they’ve checked off those objectives, the team is preparing to test Ingenuity in the actual environment of Mars. ...
Here are the key things to know about Ingenuity as the anticipation builds:
Ingenuity is an experimental flight test. ...
Mars won’t make it easy for Ingenuity to attempt the first powered, controlled flight on another planet. ...
Ingenuity relies on the Mars 2020 Perseverance mission for safe passage to Mars and for operations on the Red Planet’s surface. ...
Ingenuity is smart for a small robot. ...
The Ingenuity team counts success one step at a time. ...
If Ingenuity succeeds, future Mars exploration could include an ambitious aerial dimension. ...
Know the quiet place within your heart and touch the rainbow of possibility; be
alive to the gentle breeze of communication, and please stop being such a jerk. — Garrison Keillor
Seven minutes of harrowing descent to the Red Planet is in the not-so-distant future for the agency’s Mars 2020 mission.
NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission is just 22 days from landing on the surface of Mars. The spacecraft has about 25.6 million miles (41.2 million kilometers) remaining in its 292.5-million-mile (470.8-million-kilometer) journey and is currently closing that distance at 1.6 miles per second (2.5 kilometers per second). Once at the top of the Red Planet’s atmosphere, an action-packed seven minutes of descent awaits – complete with temperatures equivalent to the surface of the Sun, a supersonic parachute inflation, and the first ever autonomous guided landing on Mars.
Only then can the rover – the biggest, heaviest, cleanest, and most sophisticated six-wheeled robotic geologist ever launched into space – search Jezero Crater for signs of ancient life and collect samples that will eventually be returned to Earth. ...
Jezero Crater is the perfect place to search for signs of ancient microbial life. Billions of years ago, the now-bone-dry 28-mile-wide (45-kilometer-wide) basin was home to an actively-forming river delta and lake filled with water. The rock and regolith (broken rock and dust) that Perseverance’s Sample Caching System collects from Jezero could help answer fundamental questions about the existence of life beyond Earth. Two future missions currently in the planning stages by NASA, in collaboration with ESA (European Space Agency), will work together to bring the samples back to Earth, where they will undergo in-depth analysis by scientists around the world using equipment far too large and complex to send to the Red Planet. ...
Know the quiet place within your heart and touch the rainbow of possibility; be
alive to the gentle breeze of communication, and please stop being such a jerk. — Garrison Keillor
