NASA's next Mars rover will land in 100 days

NASA’s latest Mars car will touch the Red Planet within 100 days from now.

Hunting for life Tuesday 2020 Perseverance RoverLaunched on July 30, the 28 – mile (45 km) Xerox Crater will land on the afternoon of February 18, 2021 – 99 days today (November 11).

Home stretch for car-sized robot handlers will be busy.

“When we call the six-and-a-half-month voyage from Earth to the cruise of Mars, I assure you that no more croquetting takes place. Lido deckJohn McNami, Mission Project Manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California; Said in a statement.

“Between inspecting the spacecraft and planning and simulating our landing and surface operations, the entire team is on the clock, working to explore our Gesero crater,” McNami said.

Perseverance, central to NASA’s $ 2.7 billion Mars 2020 mission, will use its predecessor landing strategy. Curiosity Rover: Rocket-powered Sky Crane cables will reduce Jessero’s persistence to the ground and then fly to crash land at a safe distance.

Perseverance will use its innovative instrument suite to search for signs of ancient Martian life in Jessero, which sheltered the lake and river delta billions of years ago. Rover will collect and cache samples To return to Earth in the future Demonstrate technologies that will help you explore the Red Planet in the future.

For example, Moxie, one of the instruments of persistence (abbreviated to “Mars Oxygen in-situ resource utilization experiment”), will produce oxygen from the thin, carbon dioxide-dominated Martian atmosphere. The scale-up version of MOXIE can Help mankind to set foot on the red planet, NASA officials said. (The agency plans to launch the first cruise Mars missions in the 2030s.)

A little Helicopter of ingenuity Flying to Mars in the stomach of perseverance. After the rover descends and finds a good place for the helicopter to make test flights, the ingenuity will make a few small incursions into the skies of Mars – the first aircraft a rotorcraft will fly in an extraterrestrial world. If the ingenuity is successful, future Mars missions could be used to collect data in areas inaccessible by helicopters and act as scouts for rovers, Said the ingenious team members.

The other two Mars missions will reach the Red Planet in February 2021 – Hope, Climate Study Orbit by the United Arab Emirates Space Agency, and China’s Tianwen-1 mission. Tianwen-1 consists of an orbiter and a lander-rover pair; The mission is expected to reach the orbit around Mars a few months after the surface landing.

Mike Wall “Out there“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; Illustrated by Carl Tate), a book about the search for aliens. Follow him on Twitter ക്കൽMichaelDwall.