Here is the maneuver with which the “Skycrane” deposited Perseverance on the surface of Mars

NASA/JPL-Caltech

Samples to ship to Earth

After surviving the landing, the rover certainly didn’t waste time getting to work. “Perseverance inspected and collected data on hundreds of intriguing geological structures, collected 15 core samples of Martian rock, and created the first-ever sample deposit on another planet”, he claims proudly Ken Farleyresearcher of Caltech of Pasadena who works on the project. “And with the start of the next phase of the mission, renamed ‘Upper Fan’, we expect to see these numbers grow further very soon”.

The Champions stored inside 10 sample tubes are the basis of one of NASA’s most ambitious scientific projects: the multi-mission Mars Sample Return campaign, which aims to send samples back to Earth in the future, so that they can be studied with the utmost precision in search of traces of ancient microbial life forms on the planet’s surface.

The first Martian helicopter

Speaking of first times for Perseveranceit is impossible not to mention perhaps the most awaited experiment of the mission: the launch of Ingenuity, the first helicopter to ever fly in the Martian skies. And this is not a purely formal record, because the rarefied atmosphere of the red planet is very different from that found on ours, and it was therefore difficult to be certain about the effectiveness that the terrestrial flight systems in this new environment. Fortunately, the test proved to be a success here too: the April 19, 2021 Ingenuity (whose real name would be Mars Helicopter Scouts) took off on its first test flight, only three meters away from the rover that is its base. His mission was supposed to last just a month, but the results were so positive that NASA has decided to extend it indefinitely. To date, the small drone has moved away even a hundred meters from Perseverance, taking incredible videos and images of the Martian panorama from its privileged observation point. And for now, his mission continues.

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The crater?

Obviously, the main discoveries made by Perseverance they concern the area of ​​Mars that he has been exploring for two years now. It’s about the Jezero cratera broad depression with a diameter of about 45 kilometres in the region of Isidis Planitia, within which there was a large river delta some four billion years ago, providing perfect conditions for sustaining life. This is why the area was chosen as a target of the mission, and in the last two years the investigations of the rover have confirmed that in all probability, the area in the remote past housed rivers And lakes Of waterfall liquid. And they have identified traces of various substances that could represent the indicator of the presence (at least in the past) of microbial life forms in the crater floor. The instruments on board the rover do not allow for confirmation at the moment, but if, as expected, the samples collected in the future are brought to Earth to be analyzed more thoroughly, it could be from here that the first confirmation of the presence of life beyond will arrive. off our planet.

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