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NASA’s all-new Mars car will land on the Red Planet in less than 100 days.
The Mars 2020 Perseverance rover, launched on July 30, is expected to land inside the 28-mile (45-kilometer) wide Jezero Crater on the afternoon of February 18, 2021 – just 99 days from today (Nov. 11).
The home stretch will be occupied for handlers of car-sized robots.
Related: NASA’s Perseverance Mars 2020 rover mission pictured
“As we define the six and a half month voyage from Earth to the Mars cruise, I assure you that there is not much to do on the deck of the beach,” mission project manager John McNamee, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California southern, he said in a statement.
“Between controlling the spacecraft and planning and simulating our landing and surface operations, the whole team is ready to work on our exploration of the Jezero Crater,” McNamee said.
Perseverance – the centerpiece of NASA’s $ 2.7 billion Mars 2020 mission – will use the landing strategy pioneered by its predecessor, the Curiosity rover: An overhead rocket crane will lower Perseverance to Jezero’s floor on cables, then fly away. to land safely away.
Perseverance will use its suite of advanced tools to look for signs of ancient Mars life in Jezero, which housed a lake and a river delta billions of years ago. The rover will also collect and store samples for future return to Earth and demonstrate technologies that could aid future exploration of the Red Planet.
For example, one of Perseverance’s tools, called MOXIE (short for “Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment”), will generate oxygen from the thin Martian atmosphere dominated by carbon dioxide. An enlarged version of MOXIE could help humanity gain a foothold on the red planet, NASA officials said. (The agency plans to launch its first manned missions to Mars in the 2030s.)
And a tiny helicopter named Ingenuity is flying to Mars on Perseverance’s belly. After the rover has landed and found a good place for the helicopter to conduct test flights, Ingenuity will detach and make a few short forays into the Martian skies – the first ever flights of an aircraft to a world beyond Earth. If Ingenuity is successful, future missions to Mars could employ helicopters to collect data in hard-to-reach places and serve as a scout for rovers, Ingenuity team members said.
Two more Mars missions are expected to arrive on the Red Planet in February 2021: Hope, an orbiter for the study of time operated by the UAE Space Agency, and the Chinese mission Tianwen-1. Tianwen-1 consists of an orbiter and a lander-rover duo; the surface aircraft is expected to land a few months after the mission enters orbit around Mars.
Mike Wall is the author of “Out There” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
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