NASA engineer is watching Perseverance mission closely

In case you didn’t know, the Perseverance rover is schedule to land Thursday, and Lancert - or Lance Foster, an aerospace engineer for the NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, is excited.

But working for NASA wasn’t always Foster’s plan.

“Up until the last couple hers in high school, I thought I was going to illustrate comics for a living,” Foster said.

But after scoring well in math and science and following the advice of a guidance councilor, Foster explored the idea of being an engineer.

“By the time I graduated it was a thing that made sense,” Foster said. “… it was more so I knew I was interested in working on aircraft, working on things that fly, than that I specifically planned to work for NASA.

Foster, who gave a presentation through the Armstrong Air and Space Museum last week on the project, has been waiting seven months for the moment following Perseverance’s launch last summer.

Foster also explained, in further detail, what Perseverance will be doing.

“There’s four major things we’re doing when we’re doing our Mars exploration,” Foster said.

Those goals include searching for evidence of life, better understanding the environment and climate of the red planet, trying to understand the geological history of Mars and preparing for human exploration.

Previously, NASA had sent the Curiosity rover in 2012. The purpose of Curiosity was to collect planetary and atmospheric samples.

Perseverance will also be testing a Mars Oxygen In-Situ resource Utilization Experiment, otherwise known as MOXIE. MOXIE will be trying to extract oxygen from the atmosphere.

According to Foster, oxygen will be necessary in order to make fuel for return trips to Earth.

“[A rocket] takes all the fuel it needs with it, it takes the oxygen with it,” Foster said. “If we’re gonna do that and send people back to Mars, or send anything back from Mars to Earth, we need to do like a dozen trips to send the field, to send the oxygen, to send the methane that would be necessary to do the return trip.”

With its 23 cameras, Perseverance will also have microphones to record sounds from Mars.

The rover is scheduled to land on the Jezero craver, a particular point of interest for NASA.

Foster explained at some point millions of years ago a large object crashed into the area.

The crash “made material from deep in the surface shoot u and it would have been hot, so there would have been hot springs,” Foster said.

Foster said there was also a lake at the site, a lake roughly the size of Lake Tahoe.

“It’s a great place to look if we want to see evidence of life that may have existed on Mars before,” Foster said.

Why would we want to sustain life there?

Besides figuring out if there has been life other places, Foster said NASA intends to eventually put people there.

Foster said a goal of the mission is examining the environment in order to figure out how people could perform common tasks, including growing food, sustaining potable drinking water and developing enough oxygen for everyday life.

In other words, it’s gathering information needed to prepare for human life there.

“Our success on the planet and the dominance on the planet really has to do with our ability to travel, like when an environment goes bad,” Foster said.

Foster referenced Elon Musk’s goal of dying on the red planet. And while Foster wasn’t committed to moving there just yet, he did acknowledge there will b a time when humans populate Mars. Maybe not to the extent of having cities worth visiting for vacation, but human population nonetheless. “In the event that we prove ourselves to be too stupid to work it out here and this thing goes really bad… I suppose we would want to be able to get to Mars,” Foster said.

Following Perseverance, NASA plans to return on 2030, though Foster doesn’t expect it to be a manned-mission.