The touchdown of the next Mars rover of NASA is less than one month from now. The Perseverance rover, similar to the size of a car, the core of the $2.7-billion Mars 2020 mission of NASA, is slated to land on February 18, kicking off a new Red Planet exploration era.
A Space.com report says, on that momentous day, "a rocket-powered sky crane will lower Perseverance to the floor of the 28-mile-wide or 45-kilometer-wide Jezero Crater," which, billions of years ago hosted a lake and river delta.
Perseverance, over the course of its mission, will scrub Jezero for indications of ancient life on Mars and retrieve and accumulate dozens of samples.
If everything goes as planned, the said samples will be tugged to Earth as early as 2031 by a joint campaign of NASA and the European Space Agency, in the first-ever Mars sample-return initiative of humans.
Mars 2020 Mission
Mars 2020 is momentous in other ways, too. NASA has not actively searched for signs of life in Mars since the "twin Vikings" missions, which launched during the middle of the 1970s decade.
Essentially, the predecessor of Perseverance, the still-efficient Curiosity rover, is currently analyzing the past habitability of Mars, although it is not equipped to search for life itself.
In addition, travelling to Mars on Perseverance's belly is a small helicopter called Ingenuity, which will attempt to become the pioneering rotorcraft ever to fly on the world outside Earth.
Perseverance was also designed to help give way to human exploration of the Red Planet. NASA officials explain, for instance, one of the instruments of the rover known as MOXIE or Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment for short, will produce oxygen from the carbon-dioxide dominated atmosphere of Mars, a technology that, if scaled up, could help the human species get a position on the Red Planet.
Acronym ISRU on the other hand, stands for "in situ resource utilization," a fancy word used for "living off the land." Therefore, there's so much to look forward to, following Perseverance, hitting the so-called "red dirt." More so, the NASA rover is not the lone spacecraft that's set to arrive at Mars in February.
Other Mars Missions
The first Red Planet mission of the United Arab Emirates, an arbiter called Hope, is set to reach Mars early next month if everything goes well as planned.
That breakthrough will be preceded one day after by the entry of Tainwen-1, China's first-ever fully homegrown Red Planet initiative.
That milestone will be followed a day later by the arrival of Tianwen-1, China's first fully homegrown Red Planet effort.
The said orbiter is set to spend a couple of months illustrating the designated landing area to get ready for touchdown, which is expected to happen in May this year, officials of the Chinese space agency said.
Essentially, Tainwen-1 has been in space for more than 24 weeks and already travelled roughly 81 million miles or 130 million kilometers from Earth and more than five million miles or over eight million kilometers from Mars early this month.
Check out more news and information on Mars on Science Times.
