NASA’S ROVER PERSEVERANCE TO FOCUS ON COLLECTING ROCKS SAMPLES IN 2022

Sat 19 February 2022:

NASA’s discovery rover, Perseverance, that completed its first year of a mission Friday on Mars, will focus on collecting rock samples during year two on the red planet.

The main mission now for the rover is to explore the crater flanks and the old river delta to collect rock samples, according to United Press International (UPI).

NASA hopes the rover will collect dozens of samples from the delta and crater rim in the next two years, Briony Horgan, associate professor of planetary science at Indiana-based Purdue University, told UPI.

“It’s an extremely ambitious mission goal,” said Horgan, who is part of a team of scientists working on the mission. “We’re being asked to drive faster and farther and collect more samples more quickly than any rover has had to before.”

The reason for the deadline: The Perseverance mission will have a visitor in 2028, the Mars Sample Return mission. It is expected to land near the crater to collect Perseverance’s samples and launch them into space for a return to Earth.

In the meantime, Perseverance will use images from Ingenuity’s flights to choose the best route up the eroded crater wall. There’s a small possibility the rover could find obvious signs of ancient life, but that is not likely, Horgan said.

“We’re looking for any kind of biosignature, anything left behind by ancient life,” she said. “If we saw something like a stromatolite, an ancient fossil, that would be easier to identify, but we probably need to examine the rocks in a lab on Earth to make conclusions.”

Perseverance spent months testing its systems and those of the tiny helicopter, Ingenuity, during its first year on Mars. It also collected six rock samples from the floor of the Jezero Crater in the northern part of the planet.

The rover prepares to collect as many rock samples as possible in the next two years and transfer them to the Mars Specimen Return mission that will land on the planet in 2028.

Perseverance will use images captured by Ingenuity’s flights to determine the best route to the eroded crater walls.

Perseverance’s samples, once analyzed on Earth, will be valuable to possible future human exploration of Mars, said Ray Arvidson, professor of earth and planetary sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

Besides the potential to find signs of ancient life, the samples could provide information on problems for human explorers, he said.

Samples could reveal “health hazards such as the presence of toxic perchlorate compounds in the regolith” which could exist widely on Mars, Arvidson said.

Such knowledge could help future missions choose the best landing site for more exploration, he said.

The space agency announced that $2.4 billion was spent on infrastructure work for the realization of the new mission on the red planet and $300 million on the system that enabled the vehicle to land and operate.

Perseverance, which has a chemical analyzer, 20 cameras, a rock drill for collecting samples, a robotic arm and a helicopter, is expected to stay on Mars for two years for exploration activity.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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