Perseverance
Context
- Indian-origin Vandi Verma drives Perseverance rover on Mars, says it's incredible.
About
- Perseverance, nicknamed Percy, is a car-sized Mars rover designed to explore the crater Jezero on Mars as part of NASA's Mars 2020 mission.
- Perseverance has been active on Mars for 130 sols (133 Earth 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, from which 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 aircraft and technology showcase that made the first powered flight on another planet on 19 April 2021.
Broad Objectives of Mars 2020 Mission
- Looking for habitability: identify past environments that were capable of supporting microbial life.
- Seeking biosignatures: seek signs of possible past microbial life in those habitable environments, particularly in specific rock types 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.
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