Everything about Perseverance Rover | NASA 2020 Mars Mission | Perseverance Rover Mission Objectives | Facty Universe

As we all know that NASA's Perseverance Rover have successfully landed on red planet Mars on 18 Feb 2021. It's a great achievement for NASA as well as humanity, but why for humanity... wait that's because of it's Mission objective. Perseverance Rover was launched on 30 July 2020, with the rocket Atlas V 541 from it's launch site Cape Canaveral.

Credit: NASA JPL

Objectives

Core objective of the Mars Mission is to find evidence for microbial life and water in the ancient past as the landing site of Perseverance rover i.e. 49 km wide Jezero Crater which is connected with various river channels with it's wall and is supposed to study rocks, sand and potentially organic carbon layer over there. Perseverance will also collect rock and sand samples for sending back on the Earth with the help of future NASA Mars missions, it was proposed to collect and package as many as 31 sample of rock cores and surface soil to be tested on the Earth in the future.

Perseverance will explore around Jezero crater for at least 1.5 years, after that it will be going for exploring another sites that is likely to be habitable in the ancient past, it will seek for the signs of habitable conditions for human as well as microbial life.

Credit: NASA JPL

Another amazing motive of the Perseverance rover is to test the technology for making a small amount of oxygen from the carbon dioxide present in Mars atmosphere, that's an amazing approach of scientists for helping a human being to survive in the Mars atmosphere that contains more than 96% of carbon dioxide. So we can say that Perseverance rover consist of a form of Oxygenator i.e. MOXIE with it that converts atmospheric carbon dioxide into pure oxygen.

Ingenuity Helicopter

Credit: NASA JPL

NASA wants to test it's powered flight technology in Mars extremely thin atmosphere so that it can continue with that technology in further future flight mission to Mars and other worlds. Thus, NASA designed the 1.8 Kg helicopter equipped with two counter rotating blades, 13 mega pixel camera (same can be found in smart phones), that can click colored picture. Ingenuity will deploy from the Perseverance deck and will perform five flights during its 30 days flight campaign, each flight will not take more than 90 seconds and will fly at an altitude of around 3-5 meters. The biggest challenge for successful flight of Ingenuity is that Mars atmosphere has 1% of density as of the Earth. While Ingenuity will fly at 3-5 meters altitude but it could potentially cover up to 50 meters per flight. It ahs an autonomous control system and will communicate with Perseverance automatically.

Instruments equipped with the Rover

Credit: NASA JPL

• MASTCAM - Z is a type of mast-mounted camera system that has an ability to focus, zoom in and take pictures in 3D and can record videos at high speed, which helps in detailed examination of distant object.
• MOXIE also known as Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization and will used to produce a little amount of oxygen from the atmospheric carbon dioxide
• PIXL i.e. Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry, it consist of a X-ray spectrometer which help to observe an element on a very tiny scale.
• RIMFAX which stands for Radar Imager for Mars Subsurface Experiment which is used to observe the ground under the rover.
• SHERLOC also known as Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organic and Chemicals, it is mounted on rover's arm which used to search the traces of past microbial life on the Planet.
• SuperCam which is used to examine the soil and rocks on the planet for the organic compound that can relate to microbial life in the ancient past of Mars.

To Be Continued...