We're now less than 100 days from the landing of the next NASA-made Mars rover. The remote control vehicle with sample-collecting abilities is called Mars 2020 Perseverance. The mission originally launched from our planet Earth back on July 30, 2020, and it'll land on February 18, 2021. Let's take a peek at what this new rover can do - and what it set out to do in the first place.
NASA is giving its VIPER lunar rover a pair of car-like floodlights that resemble the kind you may mount on your truck or Jeep for off-roading at night. The floodlights will be used to illuminate the darkest parts of the Moon, enabling the VIPER rover to hunt for water in places it would otherwise struggle to see. NASA has shown off one of its floodlight prototypes ahead of the mission.
NASA has designed an interesting new rover that's made up of a pair of two-wheeled vehicles. The rover is called DuAxel, and the design is intended to allow it to descend crater sides and near-vertical clips on the Moon, Mars, and beyond. The rover can stop, lower its chassis, and anchor to the ground before splitting in two.
NASA is following in the footsteps of its Apollo days, stating that it has fit its Perseverance rover with a special type of reflector designed to be shot with lasers. The space agency did a similar thing involving retroreflectors on the Moon, which NASA describes as 'essentially small arrays of mirrors.' The idea was that NASA could shoot the reflectors with lasers to get important data on the Moon, something it will eventually replicate with similar reflectors on Mars.
After many months of work, NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover has finally launched for the Red Planet. The launch took place from the Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral on July 30 aboard the ULA's Atlas V rocket. NASA has detailed this success, explaining that Perseverance was put into parking orbit...and soon after the rover put itself into safe mode, potentially due to cold temperatures.
NASA is remembering one of its most notable July 4th events: the arrival of its Sojourner on Mars in 1997. Depending on your age, you may not be familiar with Sojourner, having instead learned about Curiosity, the now-defunct Opportunity, and perhaps even the Spirit rover, which was active on the Red Planet from 2004 to 2010. Lesser known is the space agency's Sojourner, a rover that paved the way for NASA's latest and greatest Mars missions.
NASA has equipped its Mars rover Perseverance with two tools named after a popular fictional duo. Called "Sherloc" and Watson, each tool is part of a system that will enable NASA to investigate Mars rocks as small as a grain of sand. Sherloc is located on the rover's robotic arm; it includes a laser and spectrometers that work alongside the Watson camera.
Many people might not understand the fuss over a new rover that lands and rolls over the moon, Mars, or even an asteroid. After all, isn't it just a crude looking car that happens to have gone outer space? It's easy to take for granted that these aren't remote-controlled vehicles but are pretty much the self-driving cars that we can only dream of here on Earth. These rovers have to navigate literally alien terrain mostly on their own and, as this Mini Rover prototype demonstrates, needs to avoid sand traps without much human assistance.
In an update on its Mars Perseverance rover, NASA said that it's still on track to launch the machine this summer despite the pandemic. Social distancing efforts have forced many people to work from home, but that hasn't stopped some teams from continuing their efforts and that includes many of the experts working on Perseverance. If everything goes as planned, the rover will reach Mars in early 2021.
NASA has announced that as part of its final assembly of the Perseverance rover, its team has installed the parachute, off-road wheels, and air brakes. The wheels are machined from flight-grade aluminum, according to NASA, which used titanium for the spokes. The parachute, meanwhile, will be used to slow down the rover on its descent to the Red Planet's surface when it arrives early next year.
Last week at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, NASA wrapped up what it says was 'important testing' involving the small helicopter that will be shipped with its Perseverance Mars rover next year. This was the last time the helicopter's rotor blades will spin until the vehicle arrives on the Martian surface, where NASA hopes to operate the first-ever aircraft on a planet other than Earth.
As first promised earlier this week, NASA has officially announced the name for the rover it has thus far referred to as 'Mars 2020.' Going forward -- and in keeping with the trend established by its past Martian rovers -- this new rover is named 'Perseverance,' and it'll launch for the Red Planet later this year. The winner of the rover naming contest was a middle school student from Virginia.