The time has come: a Itinerant Firmness, From NASA’s Mars 2020 mission, began actively exploring alien life. With his robotic hands and scientific instruments, he is exploring an ancient Martian lake, where there may be signs of life.
Until now, the jipinho robot was acting more as a photographer than a scientist. He sent images and sounds of Mars in high definition, and also supported the first five flights Helicopter – It will have more autonomy, acting in partnership.
In February, perseverance Landed in a jagero crater, 40 km in diameter and 500 meters deep, which was a lake billions of years ago. If life has ever existed on the planet, even if there is only microbial activity, it is most likely to store evidence – and is equipped to detect it directly, in addition to collecting samples that are sent to Earth Will go
Hey $ 2.4 billion rover There are six big legs with strong wheels, a long robotic arm and a “head” with cameras, microphones, lasers and sensors ( Supercam) Belongs to. His “arm” has another camera and a spectrometer (Sherlock / Watson Instrument) and a drill developed specifically for missions, capable of extracting the nucleus from intact – and normally inflated – missions of this type. Not rocks. .
One of the goals is to establish the timeline of the old lake. Understand when it formed, when and why it dried up and when and how sediment began to accumulate on the ground. “The more stones you see, the more you know,” said Ken Farley, a persistence project scientist.
Geological analysis can reveal the secrets of foreign life. If the rocks are sedimentary, like sandstone and limestone, the bio-signs of life on the red planet are more likely to be preserved. If they are turbulent, they are formed by volcanic activity that scientists believe may still occur, with no preserved signs of life, but good data for chronology.
Innovation
The rover will do something unprecedented on Mars: it will take at least 40 samples from various locations in the Jagero crater, and be placed inside tubes in a complex storage system. These tubes will be left on the surface of the planet for future missions. This should be NASA’s biggest challenge in the coming years – the rocks are expected to reach here only after 2030.
Perseverance has seven state-of-the-art, or completely innovative, technologies. Much more advanced than previous Rovers, which explored fish for water or the chemistry of the atmosphere and soil, it is equipped to carry out experiments conducted on site and find life – whether current or fossilized. And its 23 high-resolution cameras are already capturing details seen from the red planet.
Nevertheless, to bring the specimen to Earth it is necessary to pursue research on the natural life and formation of the solar system. Here in laboratories, it is possible to do more detailed analysis. It is also something that can expand the limits of space exploration in the coming decades.
One should continue his experiments on Mars for at least 687 Earth days (one Mars year). It is powered by a plutonium core reactor, capable of producing electrical energy for 14 years.
