NASA Perseverance Rover

[admin]

Today, the NASA Perseverance rover landed at Jezero crater, Mars. Here's a replay of the landing from the official NASA YouTube channel:



There are many ways to follow this mission. My favorites are:

• The official NASA Perseverance website: https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020. Highlights include blog-style mission updates, raw image repository, and interactive route map.

• Unmanned Spaceflight.com's Perseverance forum: http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/inde ... owforum=80. Several of my colleagues participate in this forum, and the posts are generally of very high quality.

[admin]

An HD video of Perseverance's landing on Mars was released today on the NASA YouTube channel:

[admin]

The Perseverance rover carries a rich array of instruments and experiments. Here I will attempt to describe how results from each one may be useful to future human explorers and settlers:

• Mastcam-Z -- A panoramic color camera that can zoom, focus, and take HD movies with sound. Its results could be used to create immersive VR experiences to train, prepare, and inspire.
• Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA) -- a weather station that can measure air & ground temperature, wind speed and direction, pressure, relative humidity and dust properties, and UV radiation. This data could be useful for habitat design and engineering, suit design, and hazard assessment.
• Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment (MOXIE) -- will demonstrate oxygen production from the Martian carbon-dioxide atmosphere. This process could be used by humans to make oxygen for propellant and for breathing.
• Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL) -- measures the chemical elements in rocks and soil, which could be useful for resource evaluation and hazard assessment.
• Radar Imager for Mars' Subsurface Experiment (RIMFAX) -- A ground penetrating radar that could detect water ice, a vital resource for human settlement.
• Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals (SHERLOC) -- Detects minerals, organic molecules and potential biosignatures, which could be useful for resource evaluation. If signs of past life are detected, it could raise safety concerns and ethical issues for human settlement.
• SuperCam -- can identify chemical composition of rocks and soils from a distance, which is useful for hazard assessment and resource evaluation.
• Ingenuity helicopter -- a technology demonstrator that would test the first powered flight on Mars. In the future, such drones could be used for terrain mapping, scouting (for example, lava tubes), route-finding, resource prospecting, and real-time EVA support and monitoring.

[admin]

Updates:

• Mars Helicopter Ingenuity successfully completes first flight: https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa ... rst-flight
• Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment (MOXIE) successfully produces oxygen from Martian atmospheric CO2 using electrolysis: https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa ... red-planet