Perseverance (rover) facts for kids
Quick facts for kids Perseverance |
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| Part of Mars 2020 | |
Self-portrait by Perseverance in September 2021 at Rochette, a rock and the site of the first core samples of the Mars 2020 mission.
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| Type | Mars rover |
| Manufacturer | Jet Propulsion Laboratory |
| Technical details | |
| Dimensions | 2.9 m × 2.7 m × 2.2 m (9 ft 6 in × 8 ft 10 in × 7 ft 3 in) |
| Dry mass | 1,025 kilograms (2,260 lb) |
| Power | MMRTG; 110 watt |
| Instruments | |
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Perseverance, nicknamed Percy, is a car-sized Mars rover designed to explore the Jezero crater on Mars as part of NASA's Mars 2020 mission. It was manufactured by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and launched on July 30, 2020, at 11:50 UTC. Confirmation that the rover successfully landed on Mars was received on February 18, 2021, at 20:55 UTC. As of 22 December 2024, Perseverance has been active on Mars for 1365 sols (1,403 Earth days, or 3 years, 10 months and 4 days) since its landing. Following the rover's arrival, NASA named the landing site Octavia E. Butler Landing.
Perseverance has a similar design to its predecessor rover, Curiosity, although it was moderately upgraded. It carries seven primary payload instruments, nineteen cameras, and two microphones.
The rover also carried the mini-helicopter Ingenuity to Mars, an experimental technology testbed that made the first powered aircraft flight on another planet on April 19, 2021. As of December 2, 2023 (UTC), it has made 67 successful flights and has repeatedly broken its own records for speed, distance and altitude.
The rover's goals include identifying ancient Martian environments capable of supporting life, seeking out evidence of former microbial life existing in those environments, collecting rock and soil samples to store on the Martian surface, and testing oxygen production from the Martian atmosphere to prepare for future crewed missions.
Mission
Despite the high-profile success of the Curiosity rover landing in August 2012, NASA's Mars Exploration Program was in a state of uncertainty in the early 2010s. Budget cuts forced NASA to pull out of a planned collaboration with the European Space Agency which included a rover mission. By the summer of 2012, a program that had been launching a mission to Mars every two years suddenly found itself with no missions approved after 2013.
In 2011, the Planetary Science Decadal Survey, a report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine containing an influential set of recommendations made by the planetary science community, stated that the top priority of NASA's planetary exploration program in the decade between 2013 and 2022 should be to begin a NASA-ESA Mars Sample Return campaign, a four-mission project to cache, retrieve, launch, and safely return samples of the Martian surface to Earth. The report stated that NASA should invest in a sample-caching rover as the first step in this effort, with the goal of keeping costs under US$2.5 billion.
After the success of the Curiosity rover and in response to the recommendations of the decadal survey, NASA announced its intent to launch a new Mars rover mission by 2020 at the American Geophysical Union conference in December 2012.
Though initially hesitant to commit to an ambitious sample-caching capability (and subsequent follow-on missions), a NASA-convened science definition team for the Mars 2020 project released a report in July 2013 that the mission should "select and store a compelling suite of samples in a returnable cache."
Science objectives
The Perseverance rover has four science objectives that support the Mars Exploration Program's science goals:
- Looking for habitability: identify past environments capable of supporting microbial life.
- Seeking biosignatures: seek signs of possible past microbial life in those habitable environments, particularly in special rocks known to preserve signs over time.
- Caching samples: collect core rock and regolith ("soil") samples and store them on the Martian surface.
- Preparing for humans: test oxygen production from the Martian atmosphere.
History
Despite the high-profile success of the Curiosity rover landing in August 2012, NASA's Mars Exploration Program was in a state of uncertainty in the early 2010s. Budget cuts forced NASA to pull out of a planned collaboration with the European Space Agency and to cancel a follow-up rover mission. By the summer of 2012, a program that had been launching a mission to Mars every two years suddenly found itself with no missions approved after 2013.
In 2011, the Planetary Science Decadal Survey, a report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine containing an influential set of recommendations made by the planetary science community, stated that the top priority of NASA's planetary exploration program in the decade between 2013 and 2022 should be to begin a Mars Sample Return campaign, a three-mission project to collect, launch, and safely return samples of the Martian surface to Earth. The report stated that NASA should invest in a sample-caching rover as the first step in this effort, with the goal of keeping costs under $2.5 billion.
After the success of the Curiosity rover and in response to the recommendations of the decadal survey, NASA announced its intent to launch a new Mars rover mission by 2020 at the American Geophysical Union conference in December 2012.
Though initially hesitant to commit to an ambitious sample-caching capability (and subsequent follow-on missions), a NASA-convened science definition team for the Mars 2020 project released a report in July 2013 that the mission should "select and store a compelling suite of samples in a returnable cache".
Design
The Perseverance rover represents an evolution in design from its predecessor, the Curiosity rover. The two rovers share a similar body plan, landing system, cruise stage, and power system. The new rover incorporates many lessons from Curiosity, however. Engineers designed the Perseverance rover wheels to be more robust than Curiosity's wheels, which have sustained some damage. The rover has thicker, more durable aluminum wheels, with reduced width and a greater diameter (52.5 cm (20.7 in)) than Curiosity's 50 cm (20 in) wheels. The aluminum wheels are covered with cleats for traction and curved titanium spokes for springy support. Like Curiosity, the rover includes a robotic arm, although Perseverance's arm is longer and stronger, measuring 2.1 m (6 ft 11 in). The arm hosts an elaborate rock-coring and sampling mechanism to store geologic samples from the Martian surface in ultra-clean caching tubes.
The combination of the larger instrument suite, new Sampling and Caching System, and modified wheels makes Perseverance 14% heavier than its predecessor (1025 kg as opposed to 899 kg).
The rover's power generator (MMRTG) has a mass of 45 kg (99 lb) and uses 4.8 kg (11 lb) of plutonium-238 oxide as its power source. The natural decay of Plutonium-238 gives off heat which is converted to electricity – approximately 110 watts at launch. This will decrease over time as its power source decays. The MMRTG charges two lithium-ion rechargeable batteries which power the rover's activities, and must be recharged periodically. Unlike solar panels, the MMRTG provides engineers with significant flexibility in operating the rover's instruments even at night and during dust storms, and through winter.
The rover's computer uses the BAE RAD750 radiation-hardened single board computer. The computer contains 128 megabytes of volatile DRAM, and runs at 133 MHz. The flight software is able to access 4 gigabytes of NAND non-volatile memory on a separate card.
Also traveling with Perseverance is the Mars helicopter experiment, named Ingenuity. This solar-powered helicopter drone has a mass of 1.8 kg (4.0 lb). It will demonstrate flight stability and the potential to scout for ideal driving routes for the rover over its planned 30-day mission. Other than a camera, it carries no scientific instruments.
Name
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Associate Administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Thomas Zurbuchen selected the name Perseverance following a nationwide K-12 student "name the rover" contest that attracted more than 28,000 proposals. A seventh-grade student, Alexander Mather from Lake Braddock Secondary School in Burke, Virginia, submitted the winning entry at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In addition to the honor of naming the rover, Mather and his family were invited to NASA's Kennedy Space Center to watch the rover's July 2020 launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
Mather wrote in his winning essay:
Curiosity. InSight. Spirit. Opportunity. If you think about it, all of these names of past Mars rovers are qualities we possess as humans. We are always curious, and seek opportunity. We have the spirit and insight to explore the Moon, Mars, and beyond. But, if rovers are to be the qualities of us as a race, we missed the most important thing. Perseverance. We as humans evolved as creatures who could learn to adapt to any situation, no matter how harsh. We are a species of explorers, and we will meet many setbacks on the way to Mars. However, we can persevere. We, not as a nation but as humans, will not give up. The human race will always persevere into the future.
Mars transit
The Perseverance rover lifted off successfully on 30 July 2020, at 11:50 UTC aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V launch vehicle from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
The rover took about seven months to travel to the Red Planet and made its landing in Jezero Crater on 18 February 2021, to begin its science phase.
Landing
The successful landing of Perseverance in Jezero Crater was announced at 20:55 UTC on February 18, 2021, the signal from Mars taking 11 minutes to arrive at Earth. The rover touched down at 18°26′41″N 77°27′03″E / 18.4446°N 77.4509°E, roughly 1 km (0.62 mi) southeast of the center of its 7.7 km × 6.6 km (4.8 mi × 4.1 mi) wide landing ellipse. It came down pointed almost directly to the southeast, with the RTG on the back of the vehicle pointing northwest. The descent stage ("sky crane"), parachute and heat shield all came to rest within 1.5 km of the rover (see satellite image). Having come within sixteen feet (~5 meters) of its target, the landing was more accurate than any previous Mars landing; a feat enabled by the experience gained from Curiosity's landing and the use of new steering technology.
(February 2021)
(March 5, 2021)
One such new technology is Terrain Relative Navigation (TRN), a technique in which the rover compares images of the surface taken during its descent with reference maps, allowing it to make last minute adjustments to its course. The rover also uses the images to select a safe landing site at the last minute, allowing it to land in relatively unhazardous terrain. This enables it to land much closer to its science objectives than previous missions, which all had to use a landing ellipse devoid of hazards.
The landing occurred in the late afternoon, with the first images taken at 15:53:58 on the mission clock (local mean solar time). The landing took place shortly after Mars passed through its northern vernal equinox (Ls = 5.2°), at the start of the astronomical spring, the equivalent of the end of March on Earth.
The parachute descent of the Perseverance rover was photographed by the HiRISE high-resolution camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).
Jezero Crater is a paleolake basin. It was selected as the landing site for this mission in part because paleolake basins tend to contain perchlorates. Astrobiologist Dr. Kennda Lynch's work in analog environments on Earth suggests that the composition of the crater, including the bottomset deposits accumulated from three different sources in the area, is a likely place to discover evidence of perchlorates-reducing microbes, if such bacteria are living or were formerly living on Mars.
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Perseverance parachute descent over the Jezero crater photographed by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO)
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An illustration of Perseverance tethered to the sky crane.
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The rover photographed from the sky crane during descent
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A few days after landing, Perseverance released the first audio recorded on the surface of Mars, capturing the sound of Martian wind.
During its travels on Mars, NASA scientists had observed around Sol 341 (February 4, 2022) that a small rock had dropped into one of its wheels while the rover was studying the Máaz rock formation. The rock was visible from one of the hazard avoidance cameras, and was determined not to be harmful to the rover's mission. The rock has since stayed on Perseverance's wheels for at least 123 sols (126 days) as the rover traveled over 5 miles (8.0 km) on the surface. NASA deemed that Perseverance had adopted a pet rock for its journey.
Traverse
It is planned for Perseverance to visit the bottom and upper parts of the 3.4 to 3.8 billion-year-old Neretva Vallis delta, the smooth and etched parts of the Jezero Crater floor deposits interpreted as volcanic ash or aeolian airfall deposits, emplaced before the formation of the delta; the ancient shoreline covered with Transverse Aeolian Ridges (dunes) and mass wasting deposits, and finally, it is planned to climb onto the Jezero Crater rim.
In its progressive commissioning and tests, Perseverance made its first test drive on Mars on March 4, 2021. NASA released photographs of the rover's first wheel tracks on the Martian soil.
Samples cached for the Mars sample-return mission
In support of the NASA-ESA Mars Sample Return, rock, regolith (Martian soil), and atmosphere samples are being cached by Perseverance. Currently, out of 43 sample tubes, 18 of them have been cached, including 8 igneous rock samples, 11 sedimentary rock sample tubes, two regolith sample tubes, an atmosphere sample tube, and three witness tubes. Before launch, 5 of the 43 tubes were designated “witness tubes” and filled with materials that would capture particulates in the ambient environment of Mars. Out of 43 tubes, 3 witness sample tubes will not be returned to Earth and will remain on rover as the sample canister will only have 30 tube slots. Alongside, 10 of the 43 tubes are left at backup Three Forks Sample Depot.
Instruments
NASA considered nearly 60 proposals for rover instrumentation. On 31 July 2014, NASA announced the seven instruments that would make up the payload for the rover:
- Planetary Instrument for X-Ray Lithochemistry (PIXL), an X-ray fluorescence spectrometer to determine the fine scale elemental composition of Martian surface materials.
- Radar Imager for Mars' subsurface experiment (RIMFAX), a ground-penetrating radar to image different ground densities, structural layers, buried rocks, meteorites, and detect underground water ice and salty brine at 10 metres (33 ft) depth. The RIMFAX is being provided by the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI).
- Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA), a set of sensors that measure temperature, wind speed and direction, pressure, relative humidity, radiation, and dust particle size and shape. It is provided by Spain's Centro de Astrobiología.
- Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment (MOXIE), an exploration technology investigation that will produce a small amount of oxygen (O
2) from Martian atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO
2). This technology could be scaled up in the future for human life support or to make the rocket fuel for return missions.
- SuperCam, an instrument suite that can provide imaging, chemical composition analysis, and mineralogy in rocks and regolith from a distance. It is an upgraded version of the ChemCam on the Curiosity rover but with two lasers and four spectrometers that will allow it to remotely identify biosignatures and assess the past habitability. Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Research Institute in Astrophysics and Planetology (IRAP) in France, the French Space Agency (CNES), the University of Hawaii, and the University of Valladolid in Spain cooperated in the SuperCam's development and manufacture.
- Mastcam-Z, a stereoscopic imaging system with the ability to zoom.
- Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals (SHERLOC), an ultraviolet Raman spectrometer that uses fine-scale imaging and an ultraviolet (UV) laser to determine fine-scale mineralogy and detect organic compounds.
There are additional cameras and, for the first time on a Mars probe, two audio microphones, that will be used for engineering support during landing, driving, and collecting samples.
Cost
NASA plans to invest roughly US$2.75 billion in the project over 11 years, including US$2.2 billion for the development and building of the hardware, US$243 million for launch services, and US$291 million for 2.5 years of mission operations.
Adjusted for inflation, Perseverance is NASA's sixth-most expensive robotic planetary mission, though it is cheaper than its predecessor, Curiosity. Perseverance benefited from spare hardware and "build-to print" designs from the Curiosity mission, which helped reduce development costs and saved "probably tens of millions, if not 100 million dollars" according to Mars 2020 Deputy Chief Engineer Keith Comeaux.
Commemorative and other plates
"Send your name to Mars"
NASA's "Send Your Name to Mars" campaign invited people from around the world to submit their names to travel aboard the agency's next rover to the Red Planet. 10,932,295 names were submitted. The names were etched by an electron beam onto three fingernail-sized silicon chips, along with the essays of the 155 finalists in NASA's "Name the Rover" contest. The first name to be engraved was "Angel Santos". The three chips share space on an anodized plate with a laser engraved graphic representing Earth, Mars and the Sun. The plate was then mounted on the rover on March 26, 2020.
Tribute to healthcare workers plate
Perseverance launched during the COVID-19 pandemic which began to affect the mission planning in March 2020. To show appreciation for healthcare workers who helped during the pandemic, an 8 cm × 13 cm (3.1 in × 5.1 in) plate with a staff-and serpent symbol was placed on the rover. The project manager, Matt Wallace, said he hoped that future generations going to Mars would be able to appreciate healthcare workers during 2020.
Family portrait of NASA Mars rovers
One of the external plates of Perseverance includes a simplified representation of all previous NASA Martian rovers, Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity, as well as Perseverance and Ingenuity, similar to the trend of automobile window decals used to show a family's makeup.
Parachute with coded message
The orange-and-white parachute used to land the rover on Mars contained a coded message that was deciphered by Twitter users. NASA's systems engineer Ian Clark used binary code to hide the message "dare mighty things" in the parachute color pattern. The 70-foot-wide (21 m) parachute consisted of 80 strips of fabric that form a hemisphere-shape canopy, and each strip consisted of four pieces. Dr. Clark thus had 320 pieces with which to encode the message. He also included the GPS coordinates for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's headquarters in Pasadena, California (34°11’58” N 118°10’31” W). Clark said that only six people knew about the message before landing. The code was deciphered a few hours after the image was presented by Perseverance's team.
"Dare mighty things" is a quote attributed to U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt and is the unofficial motto of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It adorns many of the JPL center's walls.
NASA outreach to students
In December 2021, the NASA team announced a program to students who have persevered with academic challenges. Those nominated will be rewarded with a personal message beamed back from Mars by the Perseverance rover.
Images for kids
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Perseverance rover's sampling bits
- The pointed one with two windows on the left is the regolith drill
- the two shorter ones on the right are abrasion tools
- the others in the center are rock drills
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Family portrait on the rover
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The full-scale engineering model of Perseverance, OPTIMISM rover
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Current position of vehicles
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Facsimiles of Perseverance's sample tubes at JPL in Southern California
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SHERLOC's calibration target aboard the Perseverance Mars rover with Mars Meteorite in the center of the top row
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Tribute to Healthcare Workers plate seen before being attached to the rover.
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You've Got Perseverance - Nominate A Student
(December 9, 2021)
See also
In Spanish: Perseverance para niños
