Placed on the surface of the Red Planet
on February 18, 2021, the big rover Perseverance
has already traveled four kilometers and collected six samples. His first scientific trip to the South ends successfully… But not without a few little surprises!
And he is always accompanied by the little Ingenuity helicopter.
A little ride on Seitah and then go away
A high-risk descent, culminating with the drop on the ground of the most imposing and heaviest of the rovers sent to Mars: February 18, 2021 was not lacking in suspense. Nor emotions for the teams concerned, for which almost a decade of work culminated with the famous “7 minutes of terror”. Fortunately, morale did not drop much afterwards as the days and weeks after Perseverance’s successful landing on the floor of Jezero Crater showed that the instruments and all on-board systems were functional.
The rover rolled, dropped off its little companion the Ingenuity helicopter a little further, then took the road south, bypassing Seitah, a sandbar covered in rocks which forms the old bottom of this basin which was flowing through a delta. It was also ideal ground for honing scientific teams and operations with the rover.
Measurements, drilling, collecting, routine on Mars
Since arriving, Perseverance has traveled 4.11 kilometres. Which may not seem like much (after all, it rolled 320 meters in a single Martian day on February 14!) but the big rover is not here for a speed contest. Above all, he studies the ground thanks to his SuperCam instrumental suite located in the mast, but also with the tools at his disposal on his robotic arm. And when teams identify a site of major interest, Perseverance moves on to drilling. Six samples (plus an empty sealed tube) were collected.
A task that was not easy with, as we remember, a first sample that had disintegrated into dust, and last month fragments that came to lodge on the edge of the tube and the carousel, the part that allows to bring the samples back to the heart of the robot. Everything is settled today, and the harvest can resume! For now, he’s rolling with it, but there is talk at some point of dropping the tubes off to be picked up by another mission that will bring them back to Earth.
Endurance for Perseverance!
Perseverance is now close to its landing site: the journey that took it to and around Seitah is over. A first scientific campaign rich in lessons before going to a site that the teams hope will be very rich geologically: the delta. For that, you’ll have to drive east… But after additional drilling, of a particular type of rock that can help – once studied in great detail on Earth – to determine the exact age of the Jezero crater.
The mission is not lacking in good news, however: the rover is doing well, all its equipment is functional and it has several years of potential ahead of it. Fellow rider Ingenuity, which now has 19 flights on the clock (impressive for a helicopter the teams had only just hoped to fly), will likely be more limited.
The other vehicles that arrived around and on Mars in 2021, although less talked about, are also still active: the United Arab Emirates’ Hope probe, the Chinese Tianwen-1 orbiter and the Zhurong rover.
Eight years after Curiosity, NASA sends a new rover to the planet Mars. More impressive, still as audacious, the mission of Perseverance should guide the exploration of the red planet for the decade to come.
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Source: NASA
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