TOPIC OF THE MONTH – PERSERVERANCE

ASTRONOMERS are excited that between the middle of July and early August NASA is scheduled to launch a new Mars explorer called Perserverance, due to arrive inside its spacecraft at Mars around February 2021.

The spacecraft then faces the socalled “seven minutes of terror” during which it plummets through Mars’ atmosphere, deploying a parachute, firing rockets and finally winching the Rover on to the surface.

If that all works (and it did for the Rover Curiosity which landed in 2012) then we will have a greatly updated new laboratory moving across the Red Planet.

Perserverance has much better cameras, a ground-penetrating radar, a weather station and a laser capable of vaporising rocks and analysing their composition.

It also has instruments capable of detecting organic compounds which are hoped to provide evidence that life once existed on Mars billions of years ago when Mars had liquid water flowing on it like Earth does today.

The Rover also carries a small helicopter drone capable of short flights which will take videos of places the Rover can’t reach.

The drone had to be specially adapted to fly in the atmosphere of Mars, which is just one per cent as dense as Earth’s, so it had to have four much longer blades.

All this will provide us with much more information about the conditions on Mars and pave the way for human visits in years to come.