Perseverance, Ingenuity set to arrive on Mars
On Thursday, after a voyage of 203 days, NASA's rover Perseverance (part of the Mars 2020 mission), and its sidekick, a helicopter-drone dubbed Ingenuity, are scheduled to touch down in the Jezero Crater, just north of the Martian equator.
Launched on July 30, 2020 as part of NASA's Mars Exploration program, Perseverance will be only the fifth rover to land on the Red Planet. It is also the first artificial object to land on Mars since Insight Mars in 2018, and the first rover to land on the planet since Curiosity in 2012.
Its primary mission will be to roam the Martian landscape, exploring and investigating the planet's ancient surface geological formations, while assessing the possibility of past habitability by seeking evidence of water and any biosignatures of past microbial life that might be preserved within accessible geological materials.
Another important rover objective will be to scoop up surface material samples as it traverses the planet and cache them in containers for potential retrieval by a future Mars sample-return mission, possibly in 2031.
Other duties relate to the assessment of new technologies (including precise landing technologies), as well as the planet's environmental conditions, both critical to future manned and robotic expeditions to Mars.
Perseverance has a planned surface mission timeframe of at least one Mars year (687 Earth days). It will be the first rover to use all five senses: sight (it has 16 cameras); touch (its robotic arm has an appendage with a drill and ground contact sensor); taste (its spectrometer uses chemistry instruments to analyze rocks); smell (its Super Cam's infrared laser beam vaporises samples to analyze mineral composition); and hearing (its two microphones will record and transmit to Earth actual audio recordings of sounds on Mars).
Perseverance's robotic Ingenuity helicopter-drone is a small (1.8 kilogram) autonomous aircraft, which will operate independently of the rover. Its sole purpose is experimental: to test the potential of powered flight on Mars.
The Martian atmosphere is one per cent as thick as that of Earth, and its gravity one-third that of our planet's. Ingenuity will operate on rechargeable, solar-powered batteries, and has internal heaters to maintain operational temperatures during the long, cold Martian nights.
It will make one or more test flights within its first 30 days on the planet, guided by Earth-generated commands relayed through the rover. It has two cameras: one black and white and one colour.
NASA's Mars 2020 mission was one of three space missions launched to the Red Planet during the July 2020 Mars launch window. The other two missions were the United Arab Emirates' Hope orbiter (which arrived and successfully entered orbit on Feb. 9) and China's Tianwen-1 mission (with an orbiter, lander, and rover that entered orbit on Feb. 10).
THIS WEEK’S SKY
The dearth of bright planets in the night sky continues this coming week, with Mercury (just past inferior solar conjunction on Feb. 8), Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn all unobservable.
The lone planet visible throughout the night is Mars (magnitude +0.6, in Aries — the Ram). Visible around 6:20 p.m., 61 degrees above the southern horizon as dusk gives way to darkness, Mars, despite its historic notoriety on Feb. 18, quietly sets in the southwest around 1:10 a.m. Look for Mars to the upper right of the waxing moon on the evening of the 18th.
Until next week, clear skies.
EVENTS
• Feb. 18 — Mars 2020 mission lands; Mars to upper right of Moon.
• Feb. 19 — First-quarter moon; Pleiades (Seven Sisters) star cluster to the right.
Glenn K. Roberts lives in Stratford, P.E.I., and has been an avid amateur astronomer since he was a small child.