June 1st marked NASA's Perseverance rover's preliminary science experiment. The six-wheeled scientists have just left at the "Octavia Butler" landing site is on a quest heading south to study the Jezero Crater lakebed. Perseverance is on a mission to search for ancient microbial life in the lakebed.
Until recently, NASA's latest rover has been preoccupied with systems tests, supporting Ingenuity -- the first helicopter on Mars on flight tests.
NASA's Extraordinary Perseverance Rover
NASA's Perseverance rover has a singular mission, to gain insight on whether or not life existed on the Red Planet. For generations, NASA's Mars Exploration Programs has been dead set to find the truth behind the age-old mystery.
According to Planetary Society, NASA's Spirit and Opportunity rovers were first able to identify that liquid water could have existed on the Martian surface in the past. Building on the discovery, NASA sent out the Curiosity rover which found out that conditions on the Red Planet, roughly 4 billion years in the past, held the possibility to support life.
Today, the Perseverance rover, launched on July 30, 2020, is set to resolve the mystery and search for remnants of ancient microbial life. During its journey, the rover will collect rock and soil samples and place them in tubes which will one day be retrieved by future missions of NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA).
Perseverance Martian Science Missions
In the first few weeks of NASA's Perseverance science experiments, NASA scientists will drive the rover to a low-lying overlook where it can survey the oldest geologic features in the Red Planet's Jezero Crater. The rover's camera has already taken about 75,000 images.
On June 1, the Perseverance rover successfully completed its commissioning phase and tested its oxygen-generating MOXIE, or the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment that investigates oxygen production in a Martian setting.
It also demonstrated the flight technology of the Martian helicopter Ingenuity.
Jeniffer Trosper, the Perseverance project Manager at NASA, says that the team is ready to push forward from the rover's commissioning phase and travel past the landing site. The next several months will be allocated for the Perseverance rover to explore 1.5-square-miles of the crater floor. Here the rover will gather the first Martian samples to be returned to Earth by future NASA and ESA missions.
The main scientific goal of the mission is to study the Red Planet's Jezero region to better understand its geology and habitability in the past all while searching for signs of microscopic life. The Perseverance team will then identify and collect the most compelling sediment and rock samples. Future missions would retrieve the samples and bring them back to earth for further studies.
For hundred of sols (the Martian day slightly longer than Earth's), the rover will target unique geologic sites in Jezero's deepest and oldest layers of exposed bedrock. The first site, known as "the Crater Floor Fractured Rough", describes Jezero's crater-filled floor. Another site is named "Seitah" which translates to 'amidst the sand" in Navajo; it has Martian bedrock with ridges, rock layers, and sand dunes.
NASA scientists expect that most challenges to the missions are set to arise from Seitah's sand dunes.
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