2020’s final Mars mission launched

Perseverance to look for signs of ancient life

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla, July 30, (AP): The biggest, most sophisticated Mars rover ever built – a car-size vehicle bristling with cameras, microphones, drills and lasers – blasted off Thursday as part of an ambitious, long-range project to bring the first Martian rock samples back to Earth to be analyzed for evidence of ancient life.

NASA’s Perseverance rode a mighty Atlas V rocket into the morning sky in the world’s third and final Mars launch of the summer. China and the United Arab Emirates got a head start last week, but all three missions should reach the red planet in February after a journey of seven months and 300 million miles (480 million kilometers).

The plutonium-powered, sixwheeled rover will drill down and collect tiny geological specimens that will be brought home in about 2031 in a sort of interplanetary relay race involving multiple spacecraft and countries. The overall cost: more than $8 billion.

In addition to addressing the life-onMars question, the mission will yield lessons that could pave the way for the arrival of astronauts as early as the 2030s.

“There’s a reason we call the robot Perseverance. Because going to Mars is hard,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said just before liftoff. “It is always hard. It’s never been easy. In this case, it’s harder than ever before because we’re doing it in the midst of a pandemic.”

The US, the only country to safely put a spacecraft on Mars, is seeking its ninth successful landing on the planet, which has proved to be the Bermuda Triangle of space exploration, with more than half of the world’s missions there burning up, crashing or otherwise ending in failure.

China is sending both a rover an orbiter. The UAE, a newcomer to outer space, has an orbiter en route.

It’s the biggest stampede to Mars in spacefaring history. The opportunity to fly between Earth and Mars comes

Rescue workers said it wasn’t all that different from lending a hand to humans in trouble.

“I think Daisy probably knows, even though she can’t say it, how grateful around only once every 26 months when the planets are on the same side of the sun and about as close as they can get.

Launch controllers wore masks and sat spaced apart at the Cape Canaveral control center because of the coronavirus outbreak, which kept hundreds of scientists and other team members away from Perseverance’s liftoff.

“There’s nowhere else I’d rather be,” said Alex Mather, the 13-year-old Virginia schoolboy who proposed the name Perseverance in a NASA competition and traveled to Cape Canaveral for the launch.

If all goes well, the rover will descend to the Martian surface on Feb 18, 2021, in what NASA calls seven minutes of terror, in which the craft goes from 12,000 mph (19,300 kph) to a complete stop, with no human intervention whatsoever. It is carrying 25 cameras and a pair of microphones that will enable Earthlings to vicariously tag along.

Unexplored

Perseverance will aim for treacherous unexplored territory: Jezero Crater, a dusty expanse riddled with boulders, cliffs, dunes and possibly rocks bearing signs of microbes from what was once a lake more than 3 billion years ago. The rover will store halfounce (15-gram) rock samples in dozens of super-sterilized titanium tubes.

It also will release a mini helicopter that will attempt the first powered flight on another planet, and test out other technology to prepare the way for future astronauts, including equipment for extracting oxygen from Mars’ thin carbon-dioxide atmosphere.

The plan is for NASA and the European Space Agency to launch a dune buggy in 2026 to fetch the rock samples, along with a rocket ship that will put the specimens into orbit around Mars. Then another spacecraft will capture the orbiting samples and bring them home.

Samples

actually brought home she is,” owner Su Hall told the BBC. She and her husband Jason praised the work of the rescue team, all of whom are volunteers. (AP) from Mars, not drawn from meteorites discovered on Earth, have long been considered “the Holy Grail of Mars science”, according to NASA’s original and now-retired Mars czar, Scott Hubbard.

To definitively answer the profound question of whether life exists – or ever existed – beyond Earth, the samples must be analyzed by the best electron microscopes and other instruments, far too big to fit on a spacecraft, he said.

“I’ve wanted to know if there was life elsewhere in the universe since I was 9 years old. That was more than 60 years ago,” the 71-year-old Hubbard said from his Northern California cabin. “But just maybe, I’ll live to see the fingerprints of life come back from Mars in one of those rock samples.”

Said Bridenstine: “There is nothing better than bringing samples back to Earth where we can put them in a lab and we can apply every element of technology against those samples to make determinations as to whether or not there was, at one time, life on the surface of Mars.”

Also: CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla:

Tropical weather barreling toward Florida could delay this weekend’s planned return of the first SpaceX crew.

On Wednesday, SpaceX and NASA cleared the Dragon crew capsule to depart the International Space Station and head home after a two-month flight.

Because NASA test pilots Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken will aim for the Atlantic or Gulf of Mexico just off Florida’s coast, the wind and waves must be relatively calm. It would be the first astronaut splashdown in 45 years.

Managers are targeting a Sunday splashdown, right around the time rough weather is expected to hit Florida. The weather system was in the eastern Caribbean on Wednesday and was expected to develop into a tropical storm.

Man arrested for poaching:

Kenyan authorities said Wednesday they have arrested a man wanted in the US for allegedly conspiring to sell 10 tons of elephant ivory and more than 400 pounds of rhinoceros horn over a seven-year period.

The Directorate of Criminal Investigation said on its Twitter account that officers had arrested Abubakar Mansur Mohammed Surur, a Kenyan national who had been flagged as a “wanted person” in the United States for ivoryrelated offenses.

He was on on charter flight from Yemen which landed in Kenya’s second largest city early Tuesday, authorities said.

The US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York has said that Surur was part of a transnational criminal enterprise known as the “Enterprise” based in Uganda and surrounding countries. (AP)

Authorities believe Surur and several others conspired to distribute, sell, and smuggle at least approximately sell 10 tons of elephant ivory and 418 pounds of rhinoceros horn between 2012 and 2019.

The haul amassed over the seven-year period is believed to have involved the illegal poaching of more than 35 rhinoceros and more than 100 elephants.

US authorities have said that one codefendant, a Liberian man, already has been extradited to the United States after being arrested in Uganda last year. (AP)