After nine years of development, the Mars 2020 rover, Perseverance, entered its last 4 months when the PANVID-19 pandemic occurred. By that time, separate sections of the spacecraft had arrived at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida to be assembled and tested. As margins of error or heists narrowed, groups were forced to paint from the house with a circle of family distractions. A four-week release window added to the tension that, if lost, would delay the project by $2 billion.
“Assembling a spacecraft on Mars and not making a mistake is complicated, no matter what,” said Matt Wallace, NASA’s deputy director of assignment. “Trying to do it in the middle of a pandemic is much more complicated. Everyone told us we couldn’t have discovered a bigger call than Perseverance. (Wallace and others in this story spoke or in videos presented at a virtual press convention in June.)
Despite this seismic obstacle, the 2020 Mars rover is on its way to the launch of July 30 to its seven-month, 31 million-mile adventure on the Red Planet. His two-year project is to collect samples suggesting beyond microscopic life for further recovery and return to Earth, explore the four billion-year geology of the Jezero crater landing site, and demonstrate technologies for robot and human exploration in the long term. The project charges $2.4 billion of progress in launch, with another $300 million for operations and surface sciences.
[Photo: NASA / JPL-Caltech] “I missed that 51 years ago, on July 20, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were walking on the moon for the first time ever,” said Jim Bridenstine, NASA Administrator. “And in the meantime, they did the first lunar return project. Here we are with Mars Perseverance, preparing for the first project back to Mars.”
Perseverance is NASA’s ninth and top complicated spacecraft that stops on Mars and the first stage of the agency’s Mars pattern recoil campaign, which includes several spacecraft and partnerships with the European Space Agency. It will drill, analyze and gather rock and soil patterns in once habitable spaces, and separate them into sealed sterile tubular caches for a recovery project introduced in 2026 that will bring them back to Earth in 2031 for a more detailed study. Take a look at the chemical and molecular fossils that provide clinical confirmation from beyond life, known as biosignaturas. Patterns will also provide clues as to how the planet has evolved over time.
“Mars samples have the potential to profoundly replace our understanding of the origin, evolution and distribution of life on Mars and the solar system,” said Lori Glaze, NASA’s director of planetary science.
Greater knowledge collection will contribute to the manned missions imaginable to Mars. By tracking environmental conditions, NASA scientists will better perceive how to protect human explorers. Perseverance will also demonstrate technologies that use herbal resources for life and fuel, such as the production of oxygen from carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere. Then there’s Ingenuity, a softball-sized helicopter with 4-foot rotors designed to fly into the thinnest Martian atmosphere. It will attempt 3 90-second verification flights and aerial photographs, making it the first aircraft to fly on any other planet. Future generations of this prototype can enable aerial exploration, explore hard-to-reach destinations, bring in small payloads, and search for human crews.
[Illustration: NASA / JPL-Caltech] NASA has a release window from July 17 to August 15 that takes advantage of the optimal positions of Earth and Mars, allowing Perseverance to land on February 18, 2021, using the least energy. Express date and time is helping the site’s lighting and temperature project plan, as well as the orbiting satellite sites around Mars that will record and transmit knowledge of spacecraft during descent and landing. The release date was already delayed twice due to delays in pitching processing, forcing flight research groups to determine whether the launch era could drag on until August. After that, the next opportunity will not be provided until September 2022, which may jeopardize this project and NASA’s long-term exploration goals for Mars.
“It’s very expensive to take Perseverance and re-store it,” Bridenstine said. “You can collect a share of a billion dollars.”
Keeping the Mars 2020 rover free of microbes and debris was already considered the project’s ultimate exclusive challenge before the arrival of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Because science focuses on the biology of some other planet, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Pasadena, California-based facility that manages the mission, had taken more excessive decontamination measures than previous rovers. In mid-March, the pandemic began creating spacecraft meeting groups that had filled 16 semitrailers.
“You can’t make a mistake right now, and the environment has made things much more difficult,” Wallace said. “Instead of your first priority being the good fortune of the project and achieving the launch pad, your first priority moves and now it’s people protection.”
NASA instituted an occupational protection program that included non-public protective devices and social distance measurements, remote paintings, making more shift plans with fewer people and more disinfection steps before entering blank rooms. Perseverance is considered an essential mission, so its flow of paints has never slowed down, some NASA centers have entered more severe blockages when coronavirus outbreaks have occurred in those areas. The decrease in restrictions last month resumed paintings on other missions, such as the return of spaceX Crew Dragon on August 2.
Although Bridenstine discovered that it was less difficult to succeed in other quarantined people, many discovered it was problematic all the time. “Working in physical isolation is a challenge,” said Adam Steltzner, lead assignment engineer, March 2020. “But we are explorers. Our task is to move into the unknown. And this is just another example of the unknown: how to make these paintings when you do it largely on a PC screen »
Members of NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover project installed a plate on the left side of the rover chassis, commemorating the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic and paying tribute to the perseverance of physical care personnel around the world. [Photo: NASA] NASA took on this challenge with a COVID-19 Perseverance plate, attached to the left side of the rover chassis. The graph on the three-in-five-inch aluminum plate shows the Earth, representing the global challenge we face together, with the support of the physical care community, illustrated through the medical symbol of the intertwined snake rod. A line that appears on a spacecraft’s trajectory ascends from Earth to Mars.
Another small plaque recognizes the public with 3 microfichees containing 11 million calls from others who have registered with the local ship to take their calls to Mars. (I checked in and my snail puppy, Flash.) The rover call comes from Alex Mather, a seventh grader from Virginia, selected from 28,000 presentations by young enthusiasts in the area.
With the launch imminent, NASA scientists are eagerly awaiting some of the rover’s bells and technical whistles. High-definition cameras on board and, for the first time, microphones will record and transmit photographs and audio of descent and surface movements.
“This will be the first time we can see a spacecraft land on the planet,” Wallace said.
The prize will be to the links between biological carbon, which indicates the presence of life at any given time, and the composition and formation of samples of rocks and soils of the red planet.
“Our bar is the best for identifying life,” Morgan said. “At the same time, we will have to open our minds to the odds of what life might be like on another planet.”
Susan Karlin, in Los Angeles, is a regular fast company contributor, where she covers the area of science, self-driving cars and the long transportation journey. Karlin has published reports for The New York Times, NPR, Scientific American and Wired, among others, of places such as the Arctic and Antarctica, Israel and the West Bank and Southeast Asia.
More
Technology Bulletin