Go. NASA is launching its Perseverance mobile robot this Thursday to Mars, designed to discover traces of ancient microbes that may have lived on the planet three billion years ago. It will also send a mini-helicopter to the red planet, which will attempt the first flight of an aircraft on another planet.
The United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket launch is scheduled for 7:50 a.m. (1:50 p.m. PDT) from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The weather forecast from the 45th Air Force Weather Squadron puts the chance of a quick take-off at 80%, indicating a low likelihood of thick clouds forming over the launch pad and delaying the launch .
If he gets there after 200 days on the road, in principle next February 18, safely, after the famous "seven minutes of terror", resisting the heat and the speed during the passage through the atmosphere of Mars , Perseverance will be the fifth rover to make the trip since 1997. All are Americans. China launched its first Martian aircraft on July 23, Tianwen-1 is expected to land in May 2021. Mars could therefore have three active rovers next year, with the American Curiosity, which has traveled 23 km in craters and Martian valleys since 2012.
Perseverance, built at NASA's legendary Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, is an improved version of Curiosity: its six wheels are more robust, it is faster, and smarter. Three meters long, as big as a small 4 x 4, it has a two meter robotic arm and weighs a ton (four times Tianwen-1). Equipped with six wheels, it can climb obstacles 40 cm high. It has 19 cameras and two microphones, which could be the first to record Martian sound. It is a plutonium generator that will recharge its batteries.
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But it can only self-pilot over 200 m per day. This is why NASA will try to make the Ingenuity helicopter, 1.8 kg, fly into the very fine air of Mars, dense as 1% of the Earth's atmosphere. The aim is to prove the feasibility of the concept. Because if we could fly machines around the surface of Mars, it would complete the work of rovers who can only travel a short distance and are vulnerable to relief.
With or without the help of Ingenuity, Perseverance's main mission will be to search for traces of past life on Mars. Scientists think they have good evidence that more than three billion years ago, the planet was hot and covered with rivers and lakes, ingredients that gave birth, at least on Earth, to microbes ...
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NASA chose to land in the 3.8 billion-year-old Jezero crater in an area that strongly resembles an ancient lake delta. Deltas are formed when rivers deposit sediment in a body of water. “These are great places to preserve organics and other types of biosignatures,” says Tanja Bosak, of MIT and member of the science team.
Perseverance must also, and this is again a first, take around thirty rock samples in tubes, which a future American-European mission will recover so that they can be brought back to Earth, at the earliest in 2031. The Indisputable proof of past life on Mars will most likely not be confirmed, if it exists, until these samples are analyzed next decade, Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA chief scientist, said Tuesday.
“We're probably looking for a very primitive life form, not advanced forms like bones or fern fossils,” said Ken Farley, project scientist at Caltech University. Unlike the Earth, whose crust is constantly being renewed by plate tectonics, the history of Mars is etched on its surface.
Over 350 geologists, geochemists, astrobiologists, atmospheric scientists and other scientists from around the world are taking part in the mission, which will last at least two years, and arguably much longer if experience is to be believed. previous rovers, very enduring.
The Perseverance mission is valued at a cost of $ 2.4 billion for the US space agency.
It also aims to conduct an experiment on the conversion of the Martian atmosphere, rich in carbon dioxide, into a propellant for future rockets, to produce breathable oxygen. In order to allow humans to go to Mars. And come back from there.
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