NASA’s Perseverance rover lands on Mars in animation
The Perseverance Rover is set to land on Mars on February 18 after a gruelling seven month journey. The rover will help NASA search for ancient signs of life on the Red Planet by drilling deep into the ground and analysing soil samples for evidence of microbial beings, either past or present.
NASA said: “The main instrument, the Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals (SHERLOC), will be mounted on the end of one of the Mars rover’s robotic arms.”
SHERLOC will emit a quarter-sized ultraviolet laser at the ground.
Space scientists will then measure the way the light scatters when it hits the ground to work out what kind of minerals and chemical compounds it is made from.
The technique will also identify the unique spectral “fingerprint” certain alien organic material might give off.
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Extraterrestrial life experts hope this can track down potential signs of past alien life.
NASA’s Luther Beegle told the JPL news blog: “Life is clumpy. If we see organics clumping together on one part of a rock, it might be a sign that microbes thrived there in the past.”
NASA will search the Jezero Crater, which it has described as “the perfect place to search for signs of ancient microbial life”.
The space agency said billions of years ago, the crater, which is now bone dry, was once home to a lake filled with water.
Perseverance’s Sample Catching System will collect samples which “could help answer fundamental questions about the existence of life beyond Earth”.
Ken Farley, project scientist for Mars 2020, from Caltech in Pasadena, California, said: “Perseverance’s sophisticated science instruments will not only help in the hunt for fossilised microbial life, but also expand our knowledge of Martian geology and its past, present, and future.
“Our science team has been busy planning how best to work with what we anticipate will be a firehose of cutting-edge data. That’s the kind of ‘problem’ we are looking forward to.”
The rover could also help pave the way for humanity’s arrival and potential colonisation of the Red Planet.
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This is because Perseverance will test a process for creating oxygen from carbon dioxide – something which is in abundance in the Red Planet’s atmosphere.
The equipment is known as the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE), and, according to NASA, “will demonstrate a way that future explorers might produce oxygen from the Martian atmosphere for propellant and for breathing.”
MOXIE works in the same way as a tree – it breathes in carbon dioxide and emits oxygen, the opposite process to animals, including humans.
NASA said: “Future applications of the technology could produce the vast quantities of oxygen that would be needed as a component of the rocket fuel astronauts would rely on to return to Earth, and, of course, the oxygen could be used for breathing as well.”
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