PARIS (CNES PR) — On Thursday 30 July, the Mars 2020 mission successfully lifted off from Cape Canaveral in Florida atop an Atlas V launcher. For the Perseverance rover carrying the French-U.S. SuperCam instrument, the long voyage to the red planet has begun. The mission is scheduled to land on Mars on 18 February 2021.
(more…)
PASADENA, Calif. (NASA PR) — 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.
(more…)
Video Caption: This video shows Jezero crater, the landing site of the NASA Mars 2020 Perseverance rover on the Red Planet, based on images from ESA’s Mars Express mission. The planned landing area is marked with an orange ellipse.
Launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida on 30 July 2020 on board an Atlas V rocket, the Perseverance rover will land on 18 February 2021 in Jezero crater.
An impact crater with a diameter of about 45 km, Jezero is located at the rim of the giant Isidis impact basin. Morphological evidence suggests that the crater once hosted a lake, some 3.5 billion years ago.
Jezero possesses an inlet- and an outlet channel. The inlet channel discharges into a fan-delta deposit, containing water-rich minerals such as smectite clays. Scientists believe that the lake was relatively long lived because the delta may have required 1 to 10 million years to reach its thickness and size.
Other studies conclude that the lake did not experience periods of important water-level fluctuations and that it was formed by a continuous surface runoff. This makes Jezero crater to a prime target for the search for potential signs of microbial life, because organic molecules are very well preserved in river deltas and lake sediments.
A recent study of the ancient lakeshores, diverse minerals and violent volcanism of Jezero crater based on data from ESA’s Mars Express mission is available here: https://bit.ly/MarsExpressHelpsUncove…
The animation was created using an image mosaic made from four single orbit observations obtained by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on Mars Express between 2004 and 2008.
The mosaic combines data from the HRSC nadir and colour channels; the nadir channel is aligned perpendicular to the surface of Mars, as if looking straight down at the surface.
The mosaic image was then combined with topography information from the stereo channels of HRSC to generate a three-dimensional landscape, which was then recorded from different perspectives, as with a movie camera, to render the flight shown in the video.
Copyright:
Animation: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
Music: Björn Schreiner
Soundtrack logo: Alicia Neeseman
PARIS (ESA PR) — European scientists will help select rocks and soil from Mars in the search for life on our planetary neighbour.
Five European researchers are part of NASA’s Mars 2020 science team to select the most promising martian samples bound for Earth.
(more…)
PASADENA, Calif. (NASA PR) — Flight controllers for NASA’s Mars 2020 mission have returned the spacecraft to nominal flight operations.
Launched on July 30 at 7:50 a.m. EDT (4:50 a.m. PDT), Mars 2020 entered a state called safe mode soon after it was placed on an interplanetary trajectory because a sensor indicated that part of the spacecraft was slightly colder than expected. When a spacecraft enters safe mode, all but essential systems are turned off until it receives new commands from mission control.
“With safe mode exit, the team is getting down to the business of interplanetary cruise,” said Mars 2020 deputy project manager Matt Wallace of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “Next stop, Jezero Crater.”
Managed by JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover is part of a larger program that includes missions to the Moon as a way to prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet. Charged with returning astronauts to the Moon by 2024, NASA will establish a sustained human presence on and around the Moon by 2028 through NASA’s Artemis program.
Scientists from the UK are playing a vital role in a NASA mission to Mars launched on Thursday, 30 July.
SWINDON, UK (UK Space Agency PR) — Backed by the UK Space Agency, researchers at Imperial College London and the Natural History Museum will help the NASA Perseverance rover select Martian rock and soil samples to be brought back from the red planet as it searches for evidence of ancient microbial life.
(more…)
PASADENA, Calif. (NASA PR) — The team controlling NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover has received telemetry (detailed spacecraft data) down from the spacecraft and has also been able to send commands up to the spacecraft, according to Matt Wallace, the mission’s deputy project manager. The team, based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, has confirmed that the spacecraft is healthy and on its way to Mars.
(more…)
FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (USGS PR) — When you’re planning to explore someplace new, it’s always a good idea to bring a map so you can avoid dangerous terrain. This is true whether you’re heading out for a hike on Earth or you’re landing a rover on Mars.
(more…)
by Margo Pierce
NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate
Robot explorers are helping pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet. NASA’s newest Mars rover, Perseverance, is equipped with technology to teach us more about the environment and demonstrate what’s needed to support future crewed missions.
“Perseverance paves the way for new science and technological discoveries,” said Jim Reuter, the associate administrator for NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD). “The knowledge and capabilities we gain from this mission will help prepare us for human missions on Mars as early as the 2030s. Technology will drive that exploration.”
(more…)
PASADENA, Calif. (NASA PR) — This image of Jezero Crater, the landing site for the Mars Perseverance Rover, was taken by instruments on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which regularly takes images of potential landing sites for future missions. NASA chose Jezero crater as the landing site for the Perseverance rover because scientists believe the area was once flooded with water and was home to an ancient river delta.
Jezero crater tells a story of the on-again, off-again nature of the wet past of Mars. More than 3.5 billion years ago, river channels spilled over the crater wall and created a lake. Scientists see evidence that water carried clay minerals from the surrounding area into the crater lake. Conceivably, microbial life could have lived in Jezero during one or more of these wet times. If so, signs of their remains might be found in lakebed or shoreline sediments.
An United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V roared off a launch pad in Florida on Thursday, sending the Mars Perseverance rover to a landing on the Red Planet next February.
Atlas V lifted off on schedule at 7:50 EDT from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California received a signal from the spacecraft about 1 hour 25 minutes after launch.
Perseverance will explore Jezero crater and collect samples for later retrieval and return to Earth by a joint U.S.-European mission planned for later this decade.
Perseverance carries a small helicopter, Ingenuity, that will become the first vehicle to fly on another world. The rover also includes an experiment that will produce oxygen from carbon dioxide in the planet’s atmosphere.
It was the third and final mission to Mars sent during this launch window. China launched an orbiter, lander and rover and the United Arab Emirates launched an orbiter earlier in July.
With a targeted launch date of July 30, the next robotic scientist NASA is sending to the to the Red Planet has big ambitions.
PASADENA, Calif. (NASA PR) — Scheduled to launch this Thursday, on July 30, NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover is the agency’s most sophisticated yet. As if landing on the Red Planet and surviving on the surface weren’t challenging enough, the car-sized vehicle carries with it instruments and technology that will help pave the way for human exploration of Mars. But there’s much more to the mission than dazzling engineering. There’s science.
Along with characterizing the planet’s geology and climate, Perseverance is on a quest to find signs of ancient microscopic life. This new three-minute video from NASA lays out the science behind this ambitious astrobiology mission, which lands on Feb. 18, 2021, in Jezero Crater. Home to a lake billions of years ago, it isn’t your typical Mars crater.
“This is a wonderful place to live for microorganisms,” says Perseverance Project Scientist Ken Farley of Caltech, speaking of the time when the lake was still there. “And it is also a wonderful place for those microorganisms to be preserved so that we can find them now so many billions of years later.”
Watch as Farley of Caltech and Deputy Project Scientist Katie Stack-Morgan of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory talk about the tricky task of gathering those rock and sediment samples, which will be the first collected from another planet for eventual return to Earth, where they can undergo the sort of scientific investigation that demands instruments too large and complex to send to Mars.
More About the Mission
A division of Caltech in Pasadena, JPL manages the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate. The mission is part of a larger program that includes missions to the Moon as a way to prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet. Charged with returning astronauts to the Moon by 2024, NASA will establish a sustained human presence on and around the Moon by 2028 through NASA’s Artemis lunar exploration plans.
For more information about the mission, go to:
https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/
For more about NASA’s Moon to Mars plans, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/topics/moon-to-mars
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. (NASA PR) — With less than 24 hours to go until launch, the weather is doing its part to cooperate.
The U.S. Air Force 45th Weather Squadron is continuing to predict an 80% chance of favorable weather conditions for the Thursday, July 30, liftoff of a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket, carrying NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover. Primary weather concerns for launch are cumulus and thick clouds.
Perseverance is scheduled to blast off Thursday morning from Space Launch Complex 41 at nearby Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The two-hour window opens at 7:50 a.m. EDT. NASA’s Launch Services Program, based at Kennedy Space Center, is managing the launch.
Follow along at blogs.nasa.gov/Mars2020 for a preview of live countdown and launch coverage, starting tomorrow at 7 a.m. on NASA Television and the agency’s website.
CAPE CANAVERAL AIR FORCE BASE, Fla. (NASA PR) — NASA is targeting 7:50 a.m. EDT Thursday, July 30, for the launch of its Mars 2020 Perseverance rover on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The launch window is approximately two hours, with a launch opportunity every five minutes.
Live launch coverage will begin at 7 a.m., on NASA Television and the agency’s website.
(more…)
PASADENA, Calif. (NASA PR) — So, you want to try flying a helicopter on Mars.
You work at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California and have proven time and again that when it comes to landing and operating robotic probes and rovers on the distant Red Planet you pretty much know what you’re doing.
But it’s never a sure thing when it comes to planetary exploration.
(more…)
