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Artykuły o Perseverance, Ingenuity
« dnia: Listopad 20, 2018, 17:26 »
NASA Announces Landing Site for Mars 2020 Rover
NOVEMBER 19, 2018


On ancient Mars, water carved channels and transported sediments to form fans and deltas within lake basins. Examination of spectral data acquired from orbit show that some of these sediments have minerals that indicate chemical alteration by water. Here in Jezero Crater delta, sediments contain clays and carbonates. The image combines information from two instruments on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars and the Context Camera. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/JHU-APL


This Mars map depicts the final four locations under consideration for the landing site of Mars 2020. The topographic map of Mars was created by the Mars Orbital Laser Altimeter (MOLA) on board the robot Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft. MOLA measured heights on Mars by precisely determining the time it took for a low power laser beam to bounce off the surface. Image Credit: NASA/MGS/MOLA Science Team

NASA has chosen Jezero Crater as the landing site for its upcoming Mars 2020 rover mission after a five-year search, during which details of more than 60 candidate locations on the Red Planet were scrutinized and debated by the mission team and the planetary science community.

The rover mission is scheduled to launch in July 2020 as NASA's next step in exploration of the Red Planet. It will not only seek signs of ancient habitable conditions - and past microbial life - but the rover also will collect rock and soil samples and store them in a cache on the planet's surface. NASA and ESA (European Space Agency) are studying future mission concepts to retrieve the samples and return them to Earth, so this landing site sets the stage for the next decade of Mars exploration.


Mars 2020 rover's new landing technique. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

"The landing site in Jezero Crater offers geologically rich terrain, with landforms reaching as far back as 3.6 billion years old, that could potentially answer important questions in planetary evolution and astrobiology," said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate."Getting samples from this unique area will revolutionize how we think about Mars and its ability to harbor life."

Jezero Crater is located on the western edge of Isidis Planitia, a giant impact basin just north of the Martian equator. Western Isidis presents some of the oldest and most scientifically interesting landscapes Mars has to offer. Mission scientists believe the 28-mile-wide (45-kilometer-wide) crater, once home to an ancient river delta, could have collected and preserved ancient organic molecules and other potential signs of microbial life from the water and sediments that flowed into the crater billions of years ago.

Jezero Crater's ancient lake-delta system offers many promising sampling targets of at least five kinds of rock, including clays and carbonates that have high potential to preserve signatures of past life. In addition, the material carried into the delta from a large watershed may contain a wide variety of minerals from inside and outside the crater.

The geologic diversity that makes Jezero so appealing to Mars 2020 scientists also makes it a challenge for the team's entry, descent and landing (EDL) engineers. Along with the massive nearby river delta and small crater impacts, the site contains numerous boulders and rocks to the east, cliffs to the west and depressions filled with aeolian bedforms (wind-derived ripples in sand that could trap a rover) in several locations.

"The Mars community has long coveted the scientific value of sites such as Jezero Crater, and a previous mission contemplated going there, but the challenges with safely landing were considered prohibitive," said Ken Farley, project scientist for Mars 2020 at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "But what was once out of reach is now conceivable, thanks to the 2020 engineering team and advances in Mars entry, descent and landing technologies."

When the landing site search began, mission engineers already had refined the landing system such that they were able to reduce the Mars 2020 landing zone to an area 50 percent smaller than that for the landing of NASA's Curiosity rover at Gale Crater in 2012. This allowed the science community to consider more challenging landing sites. The sites of greatest scientific interest led NASA to add a new capability called Terrain Relative Navigation (TRN). TRN will enable the "sky crane" descent stage, the rocket-powered system that carries the rover down to the surface, to avoid hazardous areas.

The site selection is dependent upon extensive analyses and verification testing of the TRN capability. A final report will be presented to an independent review board and NASA Headquarters in the fall of 2019.

"Nothing has been more difficult in robotic planetary exploration than landing on Mars," said Zurbuchen. "The Mars 2020 engineering team has done a tremendous amount of work to prepare us for this decision. The team will continue its work to truly understand the TRN system and the risks involved, and we will review the findings independently to reassure we have maximized our chances for success."

Selecting a landing site this early allows the rover drivers and science operations team to optimize their plans for exploring Jezero Crater once the rover is safely on the ground. Using data from NASA's fleet of Mars orbiters, they will map the terrain in greater detail and identify regions of interest - places with the most interesting geological features, for example - where Mars 2020 could collect the best science samples.

The Mars 2020 Project at JPL manages rover development for SMD. NASA's Launch Services Program, based at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, is responsible for launch management. Mars 2020 will launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

For more information on Mars 2020, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/mars2020

More information about NASA's exploration of Mars is available online at:

https://www.nasa.gov/mars

Source: NASA Announces Landing Site for Mars 2020 Rover
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Odp: [JPL] NASA Announces Landing Site for Mars 2020 Rover
« Odpowiedź #1 dnia: Listopad 20, 2018, 17:28 »
NASA selects landing site for Mars 2020 rover
by Jeff Foust — November 19, 2018 [SpaceNews]


The Mars 2020 rover will land in Jezero Crater, which once hosted a lake and river delta that may have preserved signs of past Martian life. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

WASHINGTON — NASA has chosen a Martian crater that once hosted a lake and river delta as the landing site for a mission that will collect samples for eventual return to Earth.

The agency announced Nov. 19 that it selected Jezero Crater as the landing site for the Mars 2020 rover mission. That spacecraft, scheduled for launch in July 2020 on an Atlas 5, will land in the 45-kilometer-wide crater in February 2021.

The selection of Jezero was the culmination of a review process that lasted more than four years, as scientists evaluated the benefits of prospective sites and engineers studied the ability to safely land in those regions. More than 60 sites were considered at the first in a series of landing site workshops in 2014, said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, during a call with reporters about the site selection.

By the time of the final site selection workshop, held in October, scientists had whittled down that list to four. In addition to Jezero was a nearby region, called Northeast Syrtis, which had ancient rocks of interest to scientists. A third site, called Midway, was so named because it was located between the two; it had rocks similar to those at Syrtis and was in driving range of Jezero. A fourth site, Columbia Hills, was first visited by the Spirit rover in 2003, but fell out of contention at the final workshop.

Jezero won out because of the prospects of finding biosignatures of past life there. The crater was home to a lake about 3.5 to 3.9 billion years ago that was as deep as 250 meters, said Ken Farley, Mars 2020 project scientist. Images of the crater show the remnants of a delta from a river that flowed into the lake.

“This is a major attraction from our point of view,” he said. “The delta is a good place for evidence of life to be deposited and preserved for the billions of years that have elapsed since this lake was present.” That life, he said, could have lived in or around the lake, or existed further upstream and was washed down into the delta.

The region, he said, is also rich in carbonate rocks that can be another habitable environment, as well as preserving the conditions of that early Martian environment when they formed.

While Mars 2020 is based on the Curiosity rover, including using the same “skycrane” landing system, Mars 2020 will make use of a new technology called terrain relative navigation. That system, where the spacecraft takes images as it descends and compares them to a map to enable a more precise landing, allowed NASA to consider sites with more hazards.

Those hazards include, in the case of Jezero, fields of boulders, sand traps that would be difficult for the rover to drive out of, and the edges of the delta itself. “Scientists always want to see outcrops, which are boulders and cliffs, and the people who are responsible for landing the rover safely are trying very hard to avoid those things,” Farley said.

A final decision, though, is pending on the use of terrain relative navigation technology on Mars 2020. “This selection is dependent upon additional and extensive analysis” of the technology, said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science. A final report on the technology is due in the fall 2019 “to be absolutely sure that we’re ready to go with this exciting technology.”

Another pending decision is whether the rover will undertake an extended mission to leave Jezero Crater and travel to Midway, something many scientists advocated for at the final landing workshop. The focus of the mission is, for now, on just the prime mission at Jezero. “We want the team to focus on the prime mission,” Zurbuchen said. Once that prime mission is underway and the project team understands the capabilities of the rover, he added, “I’m sure there’s going to be discussions” about an extended mission.

Mars 2020, with an estimated total cost of a little less than $2.5 billion, is intended to be the first step in a multi-mission campaign to collect samples from Mars and return them to Earth. Mars 2020 will cache those samples for later missions to retrieve, launch into Mars orbit and then collect for transport to Earth.

NASA announced its concept for a “lean” sample return architecture in August 2017 that seeks to minimize the complexity and time for returning those samples. However, the agency has provided few specifics about how that would be implemented, although it announced earlier this year plans to jointly study Mars sample return options with the European Space Agency. “I don’t have any updates today” on that work, Zurbuchen said.

He did say that NASA was planning on launching the later elements of that sample return architecture in the late 2020s. “Depending on how the details come out, it would be in the early ’30s that the samples would come back to Earth,” he said.

Source: NASA selects landing site for Mars 2020 rover

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Odp: [JPL] NASA Announces Landing Site for Mars 2020 Rover
« Odpowiedź #2 dnia: Marzec 21, 2019, 11:12 »
NASA dealing with cost growth on planetary science flagship missions
by Jeff Foust — March 19, 2019 [SpaceNews]


Issues with two instruments and the sample caching system on Mars 2020 have increased its $2.4 billion cost by as much as 15 percent, NASA confirmed March 18. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

THE WOODLANDS, Texas — While NASA’s overall planetary sciences program is enjoying record funding levels, the agency is grappling with cost growth in two of its largest missions.

In its detailed fiscal year 2020 budget proposal published March 18, NASA confirmed that the Mars 2020 rover mission is facing growing costs just 16 months before its scheduled launch. The agency said problems with two instruments, the Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry and Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals, as well as rover’s system for caching samples that will be returned to Earth by future missions, contributed to the cost growth.

There had been widespread rumors in the planetary science community that Mars 2020 was facing cost overruns, but the budget document is the first time NASA publicly acknowledged those overruns. The document didn’t disclose the size of the overrun but said that it “will report these changes in the pending [fiscal year] 2019 operating plan.”

“Yes, there has been cost growth” with Mars 2020, said Lori Glaze, acting director of NASA’s planetary sciences division, during a town hall meeting March 18 at the 50th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference here. “It is less than 15 percent over the agreed-upon cost for [Mars] 2020.”

NASA estimated the cost of Mars 2020 at $2.1 billion, plus $300 million for its first Martian year of operations, when the mission achieved a milestone known as Key Decision Point C in 2016. That would limit the cost growth to $360 million, although Glaze later declined to give a specific estimate for the increase in the mission’s cost. Cost growth above the 15 percent threshold would trigger requirements for congressional notification and replanning of the mission.

Glaze said NASA would avoid affecting planetary missions outside of the Mars program as it deals with the cost overrun. “There’s been a very strict approach in trying to look to the project first for economies, and find ways to cover some of the cost growth, and, outside of that, look to going to the Mars program,” she said. The goal is to have “the smallest impact possible to the overall planetary portfolio.”

She later told reporters that it was unlikely that NASA would take major steps, such as removing an instrument from Mars 2020, because of the limited savings that would offer at this late stage of development. “There’s already an enormous amount of hardware built and integrated and being tested for Mars 2020,” she said. Instead, she said the agency is looking at “small efficiencies” within Mars 2020 to reduce its cost, such as work that can be deferred.

Elsewhere in the Mars program, Glaze said NASA is considering “small decreases” in other operating missions as well as cost savings from the end of the Opportunity mission. NASA spent $12.5 million on Opportunity in fiscal year 2018. Other funding could come from the Mars Future Missions program line, which primarily supports planning for future Mars sample return missions. “We tried to spread it so that no one is feeling all of the pain,” she said.

During the town hall meeting, Glaze also faced questions about the decision NASA announced March 5 to remove one of the instruments from another flagship planetary science mission, Europa Clipper. NASA said it removed the Interior Characterization of Europa Using Magnetometry (ICEMAG) instrument, a magnetometer designed to measure the magnetic field around the icy moon of Jupiter, because of what Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, called “continued, significant cost growth and remaining high cost risk.”

During the question-and-answer portion of the town hall meeting, one scientist, Britney Schmidt of Georgia Tech, noted that ICEMAG was a major part of mission studies that led to Europa Clipper because of its ability to probe the interior of Europa and its subsurface ocean. She said there was a “large accommodation issue” created when NASA selected nine instruments for a mission that once planned to carry four or five, and wondered why NASA didn’t accept a scaled back or “descoped” version of the instrument proposed by the ICEMAG team rather than the agency’s plan to fly its own instrument.

Similar concerns came from the Outer Planets Assessment Group, an advisory panel that released “special findings” about ICEMAG March 13 outside of its usual cycle of meetings. “To those not involved in the process, this news came as a complete surprise,” the group said of the decision to remove ICEMAG. “We encourage NASA to ensure that this or any other termination decision is transparent, and avoid the perception that this [principal investigator]-led experiment team received a seemingly punitive decision that is disproportionate to the challenges faced by the team.”

Glaze said that cost alone was not the reason for removing ICEMAG. “The emphasis is not so much on the overall cost growth but on the other risks that were inherent in the design and the approach that was going forward,” she said. “Most of the concern had to do with the future risks and the fact that instrument was not stabilizing.”

The decision to remove ICEMAG, but not any of the Mars 2020 instruments, is based on Europa Clipper being in an earlier phase of development, she said. “Part of what we’re trying to do with the process that’s being implemented on Clipper is to try and not end up in the same position,” she said.

The challenges facing Europa Clipper and Mars 2020 stand in contrast to the rest of the planetary science program, which is enjoying funding growth. Congress provided the program with nearly $2.76 billion in the final fiscal year 2019 appropriations bill, an amount Glaze said she believed to be a record for the program. The administration’s fiscal year 2020 budget proposal requests slightly less for planetary science, at $2.62 billion.

Glaze told reporters that, even with its larger budgets, NASA wants to be conscious about keeping cost growth for its largest missions in check, an issue raised by advisory groups like the National Academies. “The intent here is that NASA is taking the National Academies’ direction seriously,” she said. “In the future, when we build large missions, large flagship missions, we want to take those seriously.”


Source: https://spacenews.com/nasa-dealing-with-cost-growth-on-planetary-science-flagship-missions/

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Odp: [JPL] NASA Announces Landing Site for Mars 2020 Rover
« Odpowiedź #3 dnia: Kwiecień 02, 2019, 23:51 »
NASA's Mars Helicopter Completes Flight Tests
MARCH 28, 2019 [JPL]


Members of NASA's Mars Helicopter team attach a thermal film enclosure to the fuselage of the flight model (the actual vehicle going to the Red Planet). The image was taken on Feb. 1, 2019, inside the Space Simulator, a 25-foot-wide (7.62-meter-wide) vacuum chamber at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech 

Since the Wright brothers first took to the skies of Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, Dec. 17, 1903, first flights have been important milestones in the life of any vehicle designed for air travel. After all, it's one thing to design an aircraft and make it fly on paper - or computer. It is quite another to put all the pieces together and watch them get off the ground.

In late January 2019, all the pieces making up the flight model (actual vehicle going to the Red Planet) of NASA's Mars Helicopter were put to the test.

Weighing in at no more than 4 pounds (1.8 kilograms), the helicopter is a technology demonstration project currently going through the rigorous verification process certifying it for Mars.

The majority of the testing the flight model is going through had to do with demonstrating how it can operate on Mars, including how it performs at Mars-like temperatures. Can the helicopter survive - and function - in cold temperatures, including nights with temperatures as low as minus 130 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 90 degrees Celsius)?

All this testing is geared towards February 2021, when the helicopter will reach the surface of the Red Planet, firmly nestled under the belly of the Mars 2020 rover. A few months later, it will be deployed and test flights (up to 90 seconds long) will begin - the first from the surface of another world.

"Gearing up for that first flight on Mars, we have logged over 75 minutes of flying time with an engineering model, which was a close approximation of our helicopter," said MiMi Aung, project manager for the Mars Helicopter at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "But this recent test of the flight model was the real deal. This is our helicopter bound for Mars. We needed to see that it worked as advertised."

While flying helicopters is commonplace here on Earth, flying hundreds of millions of miles (kilometers) away in the thin Martian atmosphere is something else entirely. And creating the right conditions for testing here on Earth presents its own set of challenges.

"The Martian atmosphere is only about one percent the density of Earth's," said Aung. "Our test flights could have similar atmospheric density here on Earth - if you put your airfield 100,000 feet (30,480 meters) up. So you can't go somewhere and find that. You have to make it."

Aung and her Mars Helicopter team did just that in JPL's Space Simulator, a 25-foot-wide (7.62-meter-wide) vacuum chamber. First, the team created a vacuum that sucks out all the nitrogen, oxygen and other gases from the air inside the mammoth cylinder. In their place the team injected carbon dioxide, the chief ingredient of Mars' atmosphere.

"Getting our helicopter into an extremely thin atmosphere is only part of the challenge," said Teddy Tzanetos, test conductor for the Mars Helicopter at JPL. "To truly simulate flying on Mars we have to take away two-thirds of Earth's gravity, because Mars' gravity is that much weaker."

The team accomplished this with a gravity offload system - a motorized lanyard attached to the top of the helicopter to provide an uninterrupted tug equivalent to two-thirds of Earth's gravity. While the team was understandably concerned with how the helicopter would fare on its first flight, they were equally concerned with how the gravity offload system would perform.

"The gravity offload system performed perfectly, just like our helicopter," said Tzanetos. "We only required a 2-inch (5-centimeter) hover to obtain all the data sets needed to confirm that our Mars helicopter flies autonomously as designed in a thin Mars-like atmosphere; there was no need to go higher. It was a heck of a first flight."

The Mars Helicopter's first flight was followed up by a second in the vacuum chamber the following day. Logging a grand total of one minute of flight time at an altitude of 2 inches (5 centimeters), more than 1,500 individual pieces of carbon fiber, flight-grade aluminum, silicon, copper, foil and foam have proven that they can work together as a cohesive unit.

"The next time we fly, we fly on Mars," said Aung. "Watching our helicopter go through its paces in the chamber, I couldn't help but think about the historic vehicles that have been in there in the past. The chamber hosted missions from the Ranger Moon probes to the Voyagers to Cassini, and every Mars rover ever flown. To see our helicopter in there reminded me we are on our way to making a little chunk of space history as well."

The Mars Helicopter project at JPL in Pasadena, California, manages the helicopter development for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

The Mars Helicopter will launch as a technology demonstrator with the Mars 2020 rover on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket in July 2020 from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. It is expected to reach Mars in February 2021.

The 2020 rover will conduct geological assessments of its landing site on Mars, determine the habitability of the environment, search for signs of ancient Martian life, and assess natural resources and hazards for future human explorers. Scientists will use the instruments aboard the rover to identify and collect samples of rock and soil, encase them in sealed tubes, and leave them on the planet's surface for potential return to Earth on a future Mars mission.

The Mars 2020 project at JPL in Pasadena, California, manages rover development for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters. NASA's Launch Services Program, based at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, is responsible for launch management.


For more information about NASA's Mars missions, go to:

https://www.nasa.gov/mars

Source: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7361

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Odp: [JPL] NASA Announces Landing Site for Mars 2020 Rover
« Odpowiedź #3 dnia: Kwiecień 02, 2019, 23:51 »

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Odp: [JPL] NASA Announces Landing Site for Mars 2020 Rover
« Odpowiedź #4 dnia: Styczeń 10, 2020, 07:08 »
NASA’s next Mars rover will soon ship to Cape Canaveral launch site
January 2, 2020 Stephen Clark [SFN]


The Mars 2020 rover inside the Spacecraft Assembly Facility high bay Dec. 27 at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Credit: Alex Polimeni / Spaceflight Now

Fresh off its first terrestrial test drive, NASA’s Mars 2020 rover was displayed to media last week at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California before it’s packed up and flown across the country to Cape Canaveral in February to begin final launch preparations for liftoff in July.

The six-wheeled robot is similar in appearance to NASA’s Curiosity rover, which has explored Mars since August 2012, but the Mars 2020 rover carries an upgraded suite of scientific instruments, plus mechanisms to collect, seal and store samples of powder drilled and cored from Martian rocks.

The rock specimens will be picked up by a future robotic mission to return the samples to Earth for detailed analysis. Scientists hope to find evidence of ancient life.

The Mars 2020 rover also carries a miniature flying helicopter drone, which will deploy after landing to become the first aircraft to fly in the atmosphere of another planet. It also features aluminum wheels with thicker skin and modified treads to avoid damage observed on Curiosity’s wheels on Mars.

“Mars 2020, in the grand scheme of things, is looking for signs of ancient life,” said Zach Ousnamer, a mechanical engineer on the Mars 2020 assembly, test and launch team. “We’re going to land in Jezero Crater, which is an ancient river delta. Here on Earth, we know those are hot spots for life, so we’re going to go to one on Mars in hopes of finding (life) there.”

NASA invited reporters and photographers to see the Mars 2020 rover Dec. 27 inside the Spacecraft Assembly Facility at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Members of the media, clad in clean room “bunny suit” attire, were able to photograph the rover, the Mars 2020 descent stage, and the cruise stage, or the spacecraft that will ferry the rover from Earth to Mars.



The Mars 2020 rover at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Credit: Alex Polimeni / Spaceflight Now

The Mars 2020 rover is about the size of a small car, measuring around 10 feet (3 meters) long, 9 feet (2.7 meters) wide and 7 feet (2.2 meters) tall, according to NASA. Those dimensions closely match the size of the Curiosity rover.

But the Mars 2020 rover is slightly heavier than Curiosity. NASA’s next rover has a fully-loaded weight of 2,260 pounds (1,025 kilograms), or about 278 pounds (126 kilograms) more than Curiosity.

Engineers at JPL completed assembly of the Mars 2020 rover a few months ago, then put the craft through a series of tests to ensure it is ready for the trip to the Red Planet. The test team checked out the separation system that will release the rover from its sky crane descent stage — a rocket pack that will lower the rover on a bridle to the Martian surface — then placed the rover in a thermal vacuum chamber to expose it to the cold, low-pressure conditions it will encounter after landing on Mars.

On Dec. 17, the rover performed its first test drive inside its assembly building at JPL.

“Mars 2020 has earned its driver’s license,” said Rich Rieber, the lead mobility systems engineer for Mars 2020, in a statement. “The test unambiguously proved that the rover can operate under its own weight and demonstrated many of the autonomous-navigation functions for the first time. This is a major milestone for Mars 2020.”





The Mars 2020 rover’s 7-foot-long (2.1-meter) robotic arm carries an 99-pound (45-kilogram) turret package containing the PIXL and SHERLOC instruments, which will scan Martian rocks to determine their chemical composition and search for organic materials.

The turret also has cameras, which the arm can place against Martian rocks to obtain fine-scale measurements, and holds a percussive drill and coring mechanism to collect rock samples for eventual return to Earth.

The Mars 2020 rover also carries the SuperCam instrument, an intricate suite of sensors, including a camera, laser and spectrometers, designed to zap Martian rocks from more than 20 feet (6 meters) away to measure their chemical and mineral make-up, with the ability to identify organic molecules.

Developed by an international team in the United States, France and Spain, the SuperCam instrument is an upgraded version of the ChemCam instrument currently operating on NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover.

The instruments mounted inside the Mars 2020 rover’s main body include MOXIE, which will demonstrate the production of oxygen from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Mars, a capability that future astronaut explorers could use on the Red Planet. A Norwegian-developed ground-penetrating radar on Mars 2020 will study the Red Planet’s underground geologic structure.

The mission also carries a weather station and 23 cameras, including the first camera on Mars with a zoom function. Mars 2020 also has two microphones to record the sound of the rover’s landing, Martian wind and the sound of the rover’s laser zaps, according to NASA.



The descent stage for the Mars 2020 rover. Credit: Alex Polimeni / Spaceflight Now

The next step on the road to Mars 2020’s launch will be the shipment of the rover, descent stage and cruise stage to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The components will be transported from California to Florida in two shipments, with the rover scheduled to arrive at KSC in February on a U.S. military cargo plane.

The other major piece of the mission — the heat shield — has already arrived at the Florida spaceport. The nearly 15-foot-diameter (4.5-meter) heat shield, along with the Mars 2020 mission’s back shell structure, arrived at Kennedy on Dec. 11 from a Lockheed Martin factory near Denver.

A team of JPL engineers will travel to Kennedy to assemble all the pieces of the Mars 2020 mission ahead of liftoff in July on a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket.

The rover and descent stage will be packed inside the heat shield and back shell, the aerodynamic structure which will protect the robot during its scorching entry into the Martian atmosphere. The cruise stage will be mated to the Mars 2020 entry vehicle and then encapsulated inside the Atlas 5’s payload fairing inside the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at Kennedy, then trucked to nearby pad 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station for installation on top of the launcher.

Once on top of the rocket inside pad 41’s vertical hangar, teams will add the Mars 2020 rover’s nuclear power generator.

The launch window for the Mars 2020 mission opens July 17 and closes Aug. 5, when Earth and Mars are in the proper positions in the solar system to enable a direct interplanetary journey. The rover is scheduled to land on Mars at Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021.

The Mars 2020 rover will get an official name before its July launch.

NASA invited U.S. students last year to submit essays with their ideas for a name for the rover, and the space agency is expected to reveal finalists later this month, then announce the name selection in February.

Additional photos of the Mars 2020 rover, descent stage and cruise stage are posted below.



The Mars 2020 rover. Credit: Alex Polimeni / Spaceflight Now


The Mars 2020 rover. Credit: Alex Polimeni / Spaceflight Now


The Mars 2020 rover. Credit: Alex Polimeni / Spaceflight Now


The Mars 2020 rover. Credit: Alex Polimeni / Spaceflight Now


The Mars 2020 descent stage. Credit: Alex Polimeni / Spaceflight Now


The Mars 2020 rover. Credit: Alex Polimeni / Spaceflight Now

Source: https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/01/02/nasas-next-mars-rover-will-soon-ship-to-cape-canaveral-launch-site/

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Odp: [JPL] NASA Announces Landing Site for Mars 2020 Rover
« Odpowiedź #5 dnia: Luty 15, 2020, 18:09 »
Mars 2020 rover arrives at Kennedy Space Center for July launch
February 14, 2020 Stephen Clark [SFN]


The shipping container with the Mars 2020 rover was unloaded from a U.S. military cargo plane Wednesday after landing at the Shuttle Landing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Credit: NASA/Cory Huston

Two U.S. Air Force cargo planes delivered the Mars 2020 rover, cruise stage, descent module and the Mars Helicopter to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida this week for final assembly, fueling and mounting atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket in preparation for liftoff in July.

The military transport aircraft landed Wednesday at the Shuttle Landing Facility at the Kennedy Space Center with hardware for the $2.6 billion Mars 2020 mission, which was delivered to NASA’s Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at the Florida spaceport for unpacking and launch preparations.

The Mars 2020 rover, cruise stage, descent package and helicopter departed NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, on Feb. 11 and was trucked to March Air Reserve Base in Riverside, California, and loaded into two C-17 cargo planes.

The rover and other flight hardware components were stored inside climate-controlled containers during the 2,300-mile (3,700-kilometer) cross-country trip.

Engineers and technicians built the rover and its support hardware inside a high bay at JPL over the last two years, culminating a development program that began with the Mars 2020 mission’s announcement in 2012.

“Our rover has left the only home it has ever known,” said John McNamee, NASA’s Mars 2020 project manager, in a statement. “The 2020 family here at JPL is a little sad to see it go, but we’re even more proud knowing that the next time our rover takes to the skies, it will be headed to Mars.”

Inside the PHSF clean room at the Kennedy Space Center, ground teams will test mission hardware to ensure all systems remain healthy after the cross-country flight from California to Florida.



Artist’s concept of the Mars 2020 rover. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Technicians will load hydrazine to feed maneuvering thrusters on the cruise stage, which will fine-tune the rover’s trajectory toward Mars after liftoff from Cape Canaveral on top of an Atlas 5 rocket. The Mars 2020 descent stage will also be filled with hydrazine to power braking rockets that will slow the rover before it is lowered from a “sky crane” mechanism onto the Martian surface.

The six-wheeled rover will be mated with the descent stage and the cruise stage, and enclosed inside an aerodynamic shell and heat shield by late June. The Mars 2020 aeroshell, made by Lockheed Martin, was delivered to the Kennedy Space Center in a separate shipment in December.

Then the entire vehicle will be encapsulated inside the 5.4-meter (17.7-foot) diameter payload fairing of ULA’s Atlas 5 launcher and transported to the Vertical Integration Facility near pad 41. Cranes will hoist the payload atop the Atlas 5 inside the vertical hangar.

One of the final pre-launch tasks before the Atlas 5 rolls out to the launch pad will be the installation of the rover’s nuclear battery.

The launch window for the Mars 2020 mission opens July 17 and closes Aug. 5, when Earth and Mars are in the proper positions in the solar system to enable a direct interplanetary journey. The launch time on July 17 would be targeted for approximately 9 a.m. EDT (1400 GMT), according to NASA officials.

The Mars 2020 rover will get an official name before its July launch.

NASA invited U.S. students last year to submit essays with their ideas for a name for the rover. The space agency revealed candidates for the mission name last month, and officials will announce the final name selection in March.



Two U.S. Air Force C-17 cargo plane carried the Mars 2020 rover from California to Florida. Credit: NASA/Cory Huston

The Mars 2020 rover is similar in appearance to NASA’s Curiosity rover, which has explored Mars since August 2012, but the Mars 2020 rover carries an upgraded suite of scientific instruments, plus mechanisms to collect, seal and store samples of powder drilled and cored from Martian rocks.

The rock specimens will be picked up by a future robotic mission to return the samples to Earth for detailed analysis. Scientists hope to find evidence of ancient life.

The Mars 2020 rover also carries a miniature flying helicopter drone, which will deploy after landing to become the first aircraft to fly in the atmosphere of another planet. It also features aluminum wheels with thicker skin and modified treads to avoid damage observed on Curiosity’s wheels on Mars.

The rover will land on Mars on Feb. 18, 2021, targeting touchdown inside Jezero Crater, the home of a dried-up ancient river delta where evidence of ancient microbial life may be preserved from billions of years ago.


Source: https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/02/14/mars-2020-rover-arrives-at-kennedy-space-center-for-july-launch/

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Odp: [JPL] NASA Announces Landing Site for Mars 2020 Rover
« Odpowiedź #6 dnia: Marzec 06, 2020, 07:16 »
Seventh-grader wins contest to name new Mars rover: Perseverance
March 5, 2020 William Harwood [SFN]


Alexander Mather, a seventh-grade student in Virginia, reads his winning essay proposing the name “Perseverance” for NASA’s next Mars rover. Credit: NASA/Aubrey Gemignani

Twenty-eight thousand students across the United States submitted essays and proposed names for NASA’s newest Mars rover and on Thursday, the agency announced the winner: Perseverance, submitted by Virginia seventh-grader Alexander Mather.

The $2 billion Perseverance rover, built at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., is undergoing final processing at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida before launch in July on a seven-month voyage to the red planet.

Following in the tire tracks of NASA’s Curiosity rover, which has shown Mars once hosted a habitable environment, Perseverance will search for signs of past microbial life and collect rock and soil samples that NASA and the European Space Agency hope to eventually return to Earth for detailed laboratory analysis.

Up until Thursday, NASA’s newest rover was known simply as Mars 2020. But last August, NASA opened a nationwide “Name the Rover” contest open to K-12 school students. Some 28,000 entries were submitted and 4,700 volunteer judges narrowed the list down to 155.

In January, nine finalists were announced: Perseverance, Clarity, Courage, Endurance, Fortitude, Ingenuity, Promise, Tenacity and Vision. The public then cast 770,000 votes and Wednesday night, Mather found out his entry had won.



Members of the Mars 2020 team pose with the Perseverance rover, with a newly-installed name plate, at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Credit: NASA

In a NASA television broadcast Thursday, he read his essay to classmates at Lake Braddock Secondary School in Burke, Virginia. He came up with Perseverance while considering earlier Mars robots like Curiosity, the Spirit, Opportunity and Pathfinder/Sojourner rovers that preceded it and the Insight lander currently at work on Mars.

“Curiosity, Insight, Spirit, Opportunity,” he read. “If you think about it, all of these names of past Mars rovers are qualities we possess as humans. We’re 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 miss 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.”

He said he became interested in space when his parents sent him to Space Camp near the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Driving up to the facility, a huge Saturn 5 moon rocket came into view.

“As you’re driving up to the campus, there’s this building that is blocking the view of … the Saturn 5,” he said. “And as you drive up to the campus, you see the capsule of the Saturn 5 slowly rise above the building, and 11-year-old me saw that and lost his mind.

“I immediately knew that space is something I was doing for the rest of my life.”

After high school, “I want to go to college, get a degree in some form of engineering or science, space engineering and astronautics sound good right now. Then after that, go work at NASA as an engineer.”

As the “Name the Rover” contest winner, Mather and his family will be flown to Cape Canaveral as guests of NASA to view the launch of Perseverance atop an Atlas 5 rocket. The planetary launch window opens on July 17.



Artist’s concept of the Perseverance rover. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

If all goes well, the rover will land Feb. 18, 2021, on or near an ancient river delta where water once flowed into a 30-mile-wide, 1,600-foot-deep crater to search for signs of ancient microbial life and to continue ongoing studies of the planet’s history and habitability.

Equipped with 28 cameras, a suite of seven state-of-the-art instruments and a robot arm, Perseverance will collect rock and soil samples, seal them in small containers and cache them for collection by a future NASA rover.

Assuming the follow-on mission is funded, the lander that brings the NASA “fetch” rover to the surface would feature a small rocket to boost the collected samples into orbit. Yet another spacecraft, built by the European Space Agency, then would scoop up the sample container and bring it back to Earth.

But it all starts with Perseverance. A name plate has been mounted on the rover’s robot arm and all 155 semifinalist names and essays, etched on a microchip, will be sent to Mars as well.

“Alex’s entry captured the spirit of exploration,” NASA science chief Thomas Zurbuchen said in a statement. “Like every exploration mission before, our rover is going to face challenges, and it’s going to make amazing discoveries.”


Source: https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/03/05/seventh-grader-wins-contest-to-name-new-mars-rover-perseverance/

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Odp: [JPL] NASA Announces Landing Site for Mars 2020 Rover
« Odpowiedź #7 dnia: Marzec 21, 2020, 21:12 »
“Overstressed” NASA Mars exploration budget threatens missions
by Jeff Foust — March 19, 2020 [SN]


Perseverance, the Mars 2020 rover, is on schedule to launch in July, but cost overruns have affected many other NASA Mars exploration projects. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

WASHINGTON — Cost overruns on a major rover mission and proposals for both sample return missions and a new orbiter are straining NASA’s Mars exploration program and threatening the future of two ongoing missions.

In a series of recent town hall and advisory committee meetings, NASA officials laid out their plans for current and proposed missions while facing questions from scientists about proposals in the agency’s fiscal year 2021 budget request that could effectively end the Mars Odyssey orbiter mission and curtail operations of the Curiosity rover.

The centerpiece of NASA’s Mars exploration plans is Mars 2020, which will launch a rover recently named Perseverance to Mars. That rover will cache samples for return to Earth by a pair of future missions currently scheduled for launch in 2026, in cooperation with the European Space Agency.

Preparations for the Mars 2020 launch, scheduled for July 17, remain on track despite disruptions to agency activities caused by the coronavirus pandemic. In a virtual town hall meeting March 19, Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division, emphasized that the mission was one of just a few missions given the “very highest priority” because of its narrow launch window.

“We’re going to ensure that we meet that launch window in July,” she said, while making sure that personnel working on the mission are kept healthy. “As of right now, and even if we go to a next stage of alert, Mars 2020 is moving forward on schedule and everything is, so far, very well on track.”

Mars 2020 previously suffered technical problems that caused cost increases. NASA’s fiscal year 2021 budget proposal estimated the cost to develop the mission at nearly $2.04 billion, an increase of 21.4% from the baseline cost estimate made in 2017. Problems with one of the instruments on the rover as well as its sample caching system contributed to the overruns.

“The FY20 budget appropriation, though very favorable for us, was significantly overstressed supporting some problem resolution that we had in multiple areas on the 2020 mission,” Jim Watzin, director of NASA’s Mars exploration program, said at a March 9 meeting of NASA’s planetary science advisory committee.

Watzin said while those problems had been resolved, those cost overruns required
“austerity across the portfolio” of Mars programs, with the exception of research and analysis. “Every other element of the program was tapped to support the problem resolution” with Mars 2020, he said.

NASA hasn’t disclosed specific cuts to other Mars programs, and a fiscal year 2020 operating plan, where NASA details spending for specific programs not specifically allocated in the appropriations bill, is still pending approval by Congress, Glaze said in the March 19 town hall.

Watzin said one change is to end NASA support for ESA’s Mars Express orbiter mission, on which NASA spent $2.8 million in fiscal year 2019. He said that mission did poorly in a recent senior review of extended missions, hence the decision to wind down support by the summer.

Other ongoing missions are threatened by the administration’s fiscal year 2021 budget proposal. “The FY21 budget that the president just recently submitted overall is extremely favorable for the Mars program, but available funding for extended mission longevity is limited,” Watzin said.

That request would effectively end operations of the Mars Odyssey orbiter, launched in 2001, and reduce the budget for Curiosity from $51.1 million in 2019 to $40 million in 2021, with no funding projected for that rover mission beyond 2021.

“We had some very difficult decisions to make to balance the budget within the constraints that we had, and this is the outcome of that,” Watzin said.

Those reductions come as NASA proposes to start new missions. The fiscal year 2021 budget request includes $232.6 million for “Mars Future Missions.” Much of that funding would go to initial work on two missions that will collect and return samples cached by the Perseverance rover. A lander mission, led by NASA, would touch down near the Mars 2020 landing site and deploy an ESA-developed rover to collect those samples, placing them into a Mars Ascent Vehicle that is launched into orbit. An ESA-led orbiter, with a NASA sample collection payload, would capture the sample in Mars orbit and return it to Earth. Both missions are slated for launch in 2026, returning the samples in 2031.

That funding line also supports initial work on a new orbiter mission concept, Mars Ice Mapper. The orbiter, jointly developed with the Canadian Space Agency, would carry an instrument to map subsurface ice deposits to a depth of about 10 meters in the mid-latitude regions of Mars. “The mid-latitudes are the focus because that’s potential landing site arenas for future exploration missions,” Watzin said, including human missions.

In addition to that science instrument, Mars Ice Mapper, proposed for a 2026 launch, would carry a communications payload to support future missions. “The primary objective for us is to increase our communications infrastructure at Mars,” Glaze said at a March 12 meeting of the NASA Advisory Council’s science committee.

The addition of Mars Ice Mapper, a mission concept not widely discussed prior to the release of the budget proposal, took many scientists by surprise. The mission, they noted, doesn’t fit into previous plans, including those laid out in the planetary science decadal survey.

“Some people said, ‘Wait, that’s not in the decadal,’” said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, of Mars Ice Mapper at the March 12 science committee meeting. “I like to tell people that not every mission we’re doing is in the decadal, especially small missions.”

He argued that the mission was intended to respond to a recommendation in a midterm review of the most recent decadal survey to maintain a “robust communications infrastructure” at Mars. Including the Canadian science instrument doesn’t significantly increase the cost of the mission to NASA, he added.

Glaze was asked about the proposed cuts to Mars Odyssey and Curiosity at the March 19 town hall meeting, which took the place of the “NASA night” in-person event at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference scheduled for the week of March 16 but cancelled because of the coronavirus pandemic. She emphasized that the fiscal year 2021 budget proposal was just that: a proposal.

“Please keep in mind those are proposed budgets,” she said, noting that both Mars Odyssey and Curiosity got high scores in the senior review. “They’ve done very well, and certainly we have the desire to keep them going as long as possible.”


Source: https://spacenews.com/overstressed-nasa-mars-exploration-budget-threatens-missions/

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Odp: [JPL] NASA Announces Landing Site for Mars 2020 Rover
« Odpowiedź #8 dnia: Marzec 21, 2020, 22:38 »
Niezłe byłyby jaja gdyby Curiosity po roku fiskalnym 2021 nie miałby finansowania  >:( Mam nadzieję że nie dojdzie do takiej sytuacji.

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Odp: [JPL] NASA Announces Landing Site for Mars 2020 Rover
« Odpowiedź #9 dnia: Czerwiec 12, 2020, 21:23 »
Mars 2020 launch slips three days
by Jeff Foust — June 11, 2020 [SN]


The Atlas 5 that will launch NASA's Mars 2020 rover mission arrives at a processing facility at Cape Canaveral in late May. A problem with a crane used for launch vehicle processing has delayed the mission's launch by three days to July 20. Credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett

WASHINGTON — A launch vehicle processing “hiccup” has pushed back next month’s launch of NASA’s Mars 2020 rover mission by three days.

NASA Associate Administrator Steve Jurczyk revealed the delay in a presentation to a joint meeting of the National Academies’ Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board and Space Studies Board (SSB) June 9. “We had a little bit of a hiccup with ULA and the launch vehicle processing, so we’re incurring a three-day delay,” he said.

He didn’t elaborate on the issue that caused the delay, but a spokesperson for United Launch Alliance, which is providing the Atlas 5 used to launch Mars 2020, told SpaceNews June 10 that “additional time was needed for the team to repair an issue with the ground system equipment.”

Tory Bruno, ULA president and chief executive, said on Twitter that a problem with a crane used as part of launch vehicle processing caused the delay, an issue that has since been corrected.

The delay pushed back the launch of Mars 2020 to July 20, with a two-hour window opening at 9:15 a.m. Eastern, from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Before the launch vehicle processing problem, Mars 2020 had remained set to launch July 17, the first day of the overall launch window for the mission. That launch window extends to Aug. 11.

If Mars 2020 doesn’t launch by Aug. 11, the mission will have to wait until the next launch opportunity more than two years later. That’s the main reason that NASA elevated the mission to one of its highest priorities during the coronavirus pandemic, alongside the SpaceX Demo-2 commercial crew mission.

NASA went to significant lengths to keep Mars 2020 on schedule, including using agency aircraft to ferry personnel and equipment to the Kennedy Space Center, where the spacecraft is wrapping up pre-launch preparations, to avoid any risks of coronavirus exposure from commercial flights.

Mars 2020, whose rover was named Perseverance earlier this year, is the first step in a multi-mission effort to return samples from Mars to Earth. Perseverance will collect those samples, which will be picked up by a rover launched on a second mission. That second rover will place the samples into a small rocket called a Mars Ascent Vehicle, which will lift off from the planet and place the sample container in orbit. A third mission, an orbiter, will collect the samples and return them to Earth as soon as 2031.

Mars 2020 is closely modeled on the Mars Science Laboratory mission and its Curiosity rover that landed on Mars in 2012. “We land in a similar fashion to Curiosity,” said Adam Steltzner, Mars 2020 project chief engineer, at a June 10 SSB meeting. “We’ve added some tricks to our landing system to make the performance even better,” allowing a more precise targeting of the rover’s landing site.

Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, told the SSB at its June 10 meeting that he was not concerned about this three-day slip. “We have a long window ahead of us. We always start by targeting the first day of the window,” he said. “It’s rocket science, remember.”


Source: https://spacenews.com/mars-2020-launch-slips-three-days/

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Odp: [SN] Mars 2020 rover mission to cost more than $2 billion
« Odpowiedź #10 dnia: Lipiec 31, 2020, 03:18 »
Mars 2020 rover mission to cost more than $2 billion
by Jeff Foust — July 20, 2016 [SN]


NASA artist's concept of Mars 2020 rover. Credit: NASA

WASHINGTON — As NASA’s next flagship Mars mission, the Mars 2020 rover, moves into its next phase of development, agency officials say the mission will cost $2.1 billion, more than originally estimated for a mission that they argue will also be more capable than first planned.

NASA announced July 15 that the Mars 2020 mission passed a development milestone known as Key Decision Point C (KDP-C), allowing the mission to proceed into Phase C design and development work. The rover is scheduled for launch in mid-2020 and land on Mars in February 2021.

The rover’s primary mission will be to collect rock and soil samples for eventual return to Earth. “The Mars 2020 rover is the first step in a potential multi-mission campaign to return carefully selected and sealed samples of Martian rocks and soil to Earth,” said Geoff Yoder, NASA’s acting associate administrator for science, in a statement.

Completion of the KDP-C milestone for NASA missions is usually accompanied by a formal cost and schedule estimate. Those figures were not included in the July 15 announcement, but Jet Propulsion Laboratory spokesman Guy Webster said July 18 that Mars 2020 now has a cost estimate of $2.1 billion for its development and launch. An additional $300 million will cover operations for one Martian year, or 687 days. Both estimates are at the 70 percent confidence level, meaning that there is a 70 percent chance their costs will be no more than those values.

That amount is significantly higher than initial estimates for the mission when John Grunsfeld, NASA associate administrator for science at the time, announced plans for the mission in December 2012. AHe said then the mission would cost about $1.5 billion, or 40 percent less than the $2.5 billion cost of the Mars Science Laboratory mission that landed the Curiosity rover on Mars in August 2012.

A reason for the cost savings is that the 2020 rover would be based on Curiosity’s design, and make use of “heritage” hardware in the form of spares built for but not used by Curiosity. “Since Mars 2020 is leveraging the design and some spare hardware from Curiosity, a significant amount of the mission’s heritage components have already been built during Phases A and B,” said George Tahu, the Mars 2020 program executive at NASA Headquarters, in the July 15 statement.

Tahu said July 19 that the original estimate of $1.5 billion for Mars 2020 was based on initial assumptions of “a more constrained scope of mission that fit within the planetary science budget environment at the time.” That initial estimate, he said, did not include potential contributions from NASA’s space technology and human spaceflight mission directorates, and “assumed a more modest science payload than what was solicited and ultimately selected.”

At the time NASA approved Mars 2020 to go into Phase A, where it defines the mission’s concept and requirements, NASA assumed “a scope that was at the $2 billion order of magnitude for development and launch,” he said, taking into account plans for a larger science payload. NASA selected seven instruments to fly on the rover in July 2014, at a projected cost of $130 million.

Tahu said that the mission also decided to add new technologies to the rover, including a system that increases the accuracy of the rover’s landing and another to improve the rover’s ability to drive autonomously. “Our confirmed cost today, in real year dollars, of $2.1 billion for development and launch and $300 million for prime mission operations remains consistent with the scope and cost approved at the start of the project,” he said.

Mars 2020 is the first step in a long-term effort for Mars sample return, and is based on a mission concept endorsed as the highest priority large mission by the most recent planetary science decadal study published in 2011. However, returning the samples to Earth would likely require two additional missions: one to land on Mars, take the samples collected by Mars 2020, and launch them into Mars orbit; and another to collect the sample canister in Mars orbit and return it to Earth.

Neither of those missions is under development by NASA. However, some NASA studies have suggested using a Mars orbiter mission proposed for launch in 2022, primarily as a telecommunications relay and reconnaissance platform, to also collect the sample in Mars orbit and return it to Earth. That would require the use of a large solar electric propulsion system like the one NASA is proposing for use on its Asteroid Redirect Mission.

On July 18, NASA announced it awarded study contracts for that Mars orbiter mission to five companies: Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Orbital ATK and Space Systems Loral. Those studies will examine ways “for supporting additional scientific instruments and functionalities” with the orbiter beyond its primary communications and imaging roles, according to a NASA statement, although it does not specifically mention sample return.


Source: https://spacenews.com/mars-2020-rover-mission-to-cost-more-than-2-billion/
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Odp: [SN] Atlas 5 launches Mars 2020 mission
« Odpowiedź #11 dnia: Lipiec 31, 2020, 03:20 »
Atlas 5 launches Mars 2020 mission
by Jeff Foust — July 30, 2020 [SN]


The Atlas 5 carrying Mars 2020 lifts off from Cape Canaveral July 30. Credit: Craig Vander Galien for SpaceNews

WASHINGTON — NASA’s most sophisticated Mars rover yet is on its way to the red planet after a successful launch July 30.

A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket lifted off from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 7:50 a.m. Eastern. The liftoff took place on schedule with no issues reported during the countdown. The only hiccup was a minor earthquake felt at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the control center for the mission, shortly before liftoff; the quake did not affect center operations.

The Mars 2020 spacecraft separated from the rocket’s Centaur upper stage 57 minutes after liftoff and five minutes after a second burn of the Centaur that placed the spacecraft on a trajectory toward Mars.

Mars 2020 will deliver the Perseverance rover in Jezero Crater, landing on Feb. 18, 2021. That crater once hosted a lake with a river delta flowing into it, and scientists believe the rocks there may preserve evidence of any past Martian life.

“We’ll be searching for biosignatures: patterns, textures or substances that require the influence of life to form,” said Katie Stack Morgan, Mars 2020 deputy project scientist, during a briefing to preview the mission.

Perseverance is based on the Curiosity rover that has been on Mars since August 2012, but with a number of modifications. “We’re carrying about 50% more surface payload than Curiosity did, and that was by far the most complex thing we had ever done up until that time,” Matt Wallace, Mars 2020 deputy program manager, said at a pre-launch briefing.

Much of that additional payload, and complexity, is for the rover’s system to collect samples of Martian rocks. The rover will cache up to three dozen samples in tubes for return to Earth by two later missions that NASA is developing in cooperation with the European Space Agency for launch in 2026.

The rover includes several other upgrades. A terrain relative navigation system will compare images taken by the spacecraft during its descent to the Martian surface with maps on the spacecraft, and direct the spacecraft accordingly to enable a pinpoint landing. Engineers also upgraded the rover’s wheels after rocks damaged the wheels on Curiosity.

In addition to its payload of sample collection equipment and scientific experiments, Perseverance is carrying a small helicopter called Ingenuity. The 1.8-kilogram helicopter, stored on the rover’s belly pan, will be released after landing for a series of flight tests.

“We as human beings have never flown a rotorcraft outside of our Earth’s atmosphere, so this will be very much a Wright Brothers moment,” said Mimi Aung, Ingenuity Mars Helicopter project manager at JPL, during a pre-launch briefing. Engineers hope to perform several flights of Ingenuity over 30 days to test its performance.

Aung compared Ingenuity to Sojourner, the small rover flown on the Mars Pathfinder lander mission in 1997, paving the way for larger rovers like Perseverance. “This Mars helicopter, Ingenuity, could lead to the opening of a whole new way to explore,” she said.


Source: https://spacenews.com/atlas-5-launches-mars-2020-mission/

NASA’s Perseverance rover leaves Earth bound for Mars (1)
July 30, 2020 Stephen Clark [SFN]


NASA’s Perseverance rover lifts off Thursday from Cape Canaveral aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket. Credit: Alex Polimeni / Spaceflight Now

Persevering through a global pandemic, a last-minute earthquake, and the trials of a rocket launch, NASA’s next Mars rover — named Perseverance — took off from Cape Canaveral Thursday on a nearly seven-month journey to the Red Planet with sophisticated science instruments, technology to collect samples for to Earth, and the first interplanetary helicopter that could produce a “Wright Brothers moment” on another world.

The $2.7 billion Mars 2020 billion mission is poised to achieve numerous firsts on the Red Planet, but first it had to leave Earth on top of a powerful rocket to kick off a 300-million-mile (nearly 500-million-kilometer) voyage through the solar system.

An Atlas 5 rocket built by United Launch Alliance — a 50-50 joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin — gave the Perseverance rover a perfect ride into space Thursday after lifting off from Cape Canaveral at 7:50 a.m. EDT (1150 GMT).

Four solid rocket motors and a Russian-made RD-180 main engine gave the Atlas 5 and the Perseverance rover their initial boost into space. An RL10 engine on the Centaur upper stage, fueled by an efficient mix of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants, fired two times to accelerate the Mars-bound rover to a velocity of nearly 25,000 mph (more than 11 kilometers per second).

That was enough speed to allow the 9,000-pound (4.1-metric ton) spacecraft to break free of the grip of Earth’s gravity and head into deep space.

The Perseverance rover is the centerpiece of NASA’s Mars 2020 mission, which will seek signs of ancient microbial life forms that scientists believe could have populated the Red Planet billions of years ago.

The six-wheeled rover is essentially a robotic geologist, but it also hosts trailblazing technologies that will pave the way for future missions. Those include NASA’s Mars Helicopter, named Ingenuity, and an experiment to demonstrate the production of oxygen from carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere.

“We’re doing transformative science,” said Matt Wallace, the Mars 2020 mission’s deputy project manager at JPL, before the mission’s launch. “Really, for the first time, we’re looking for signs of life on another planet, and for the first time we’re going to collect samples that we hope will be part of the first sample return from another planet.”



The Atlas 5 rocket with the Mars 2020 spacecraft exceeded the speed of sound just 35 seconds after liftoff. Credit: Stephen Clark / Spaceflight Now

The Atlas 5 launcher performed flawlessly Thursday, deploying the Mars 2020 spacecraft right on its predicted course nearly one hour after liftoff. The Centaur upper stage spun up to about 2 rpm before releasing the spacecraft.

The rocket injected the probe into an orbit between the planets around the sun, setting the stage for a cruise to Mars that will culminate in a high-stakes, one-shot attempt to land on Red Planet on Feb. 18, 2021.

“The orbital parameters look dead on,” said Omar Baez, NASA’s launch director for the Mars 2020 mission. “Our velocity is dead on. So we’re on our way to Mars. There’s no way back.”

While the Perseverance rover itself won’t come back from Mars, some of the hardware on-board the vehicle is designed to eventually return to Earth. The rover carries 43 tubes, each about the size of a slim cigar, to hold rock and soil samples collected after Perseverance’s landing. The vehicle will drop the tubes on the surface of Mars for retrieval by another robotic mission in the late 2020s, which will bring the specimens back to Earth.

“The mission objectives of our effort are to explore the geology of our landing site, to look for signs of biosignatures from the past,” said Adam Steltzner, chief engineer on the Mars 2020 mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “We are not a life detection mission. We are looking for signs of past life on the surface of  Mars. Also, signatures that Mars was habitable, and to the degree that is still habitable, where it might be habitable. Our third objective is to prepare a returnable cache of samples, and then fourth is to prepare for future human exploration.”

While the launch itself was as advertised, ground controllers at JPL initially had trouble establishing a two-way communications link with the Mars 2020 spacecraft after it separated from the Atlas 5 rocket. Right on time, at 9:15 a.m. EDT (1315 GMT), the spacecraft turned on its transmitter and began sending a carrier signal to a NASA ground station in Australia.

But the Deep Space Network station is usually attuned to listening for faint signals from distant regions of the solar system. The high-power signal coming from the Mars 2020 spacecraft saturated the antenna’s receiver, so operators had to adjust settings at the ground station to begin deciphering telemetry information the probe was sending back to Earth shortly after launch Thursday.


Cytuj
Here’s a replay of the liftoff of the Atlas 5 rocket with NASA’s Perseverance rover. Continuing live coverage: https://t.co/B6rcMHiZuY pic.twitter.com/COSlGjCU3C

— Spaceflight Now (@SpaceflightNow) July 30, 2020

A couple of hours later, NASA officials confirmed they were receiving telemetry data from Mars 2020. Soon after, Wallace said the mission had encountered a separate issue after launch that put the spacecraft into safe mode, a precautionary standby state where the probe’s computer curtails non-essential functions.

In an interview Thursday afternoon, Wallace said the spacecraft apparently went into safe mode as it passed over the night side of Earth just after launch, a period known as an eclipse.

“We think that as we went through eclipse, where the spacecraft is shadowed by the Earth from the sun, the external temperatures changed,” Wallace told Spaceflight Now.

NASA later said in a statement that the temperature disparity was in the Mars 2020 spacecraft’s liquid freon coolant loop, which dissipates heat from the center of the spacecraft through radiators on the carrier module carrying the rover to Mars.

Temperatures outside the spacecraft may have dipped lower than expected, he said, creating a higher-than-expected temperature differential between the warm radiator inlet and the cooler outlet.  As a precaution, programmers set tight limits on key spacecraft parameters before the launch, and the cold conditions may be tripped a preset limit.

“Chances are we may have just tightened down on that limit a little too much, and it triggered a safe mode,” Wallace told Spaceflight Now.

NASA’s Curiosity rover, upon which Perseverance was designed, did not enter the Earth’s shadow after its launch in 2011. So engineers relied on analytical modeling to predict the temperatures during the eclipse.

“We set the limits for the temperature differential conservatively tight for triggering a safe mode,” Wallace said. “The philosophy is that it is far better to trigger a safe mode event when not required, than miss one that is. Safe mode is a stable and acceptable mode for the spacecraft, and triggering safe mode during this transitional phase is not problematic for Mars 2020.”

While it’s in safe mode, the spacecraft transmits data back to Earth at a slower rate than during normal operations. Ground teams Thursday afternoon were trying to increase the data rate, but the information coming down from the Mars 2020 spacecraft thus far indicated there were no other problems on the probe, and temperatures were back within limits after the craft flew back into sunlight.

“We are getting good telemetry,” Wallace said. “It’s indicating the spacecraft is healthy.”


Cytuj
#MarsPerseverance on its way to the Red Planet… pic.twitter.com/8XeEehuml8

— Tory Bruno (@torybruno) July 30, 2020

Controllers at JPL will complete their assessment of the spacecraft’s condition, develop and test commands, then uplink the orders to the Mars 2020 spacecraft to bring it back into its normal operating mode, perhaps as soon as Friday, according to Wallace.

“We’re in no hurry,” he said. “We’re perfectly happy in safe mode.”

One of the first major milestones on the flight to Mars will be a course correction maneuver using the Mars 2020 spacecraft’s cruise stage, the element that helps guide the rover during the interplanetary journey to the Red Planet. That burn will adjust the spacecraft’s trajectory to aim directly at Mars after the Atlas 5 rocket intentionally put the probe on path that would just miss Mars, ensuring the launcher’s Centaur upper stage will not crash into the planet.

Wallace said it is not unusual for a newly-launch spacecraft to go into safe mode.

“Basically, the spacecraft is transitioning out of one environment into another,” Wallace said. “So it’s not uncommon for something to trigger it. Safe mode is called safe mode because it’s the safest condition for the spacecraft to be in.”

But there was a brief bit of drama before the launch. A small earthquake in Southern California gave a jolt to Mars 2020 mission control at JPL, near Los Angeles.

After a quick assessment, officials determined the ground controllers, who were following health protocols to protect against the COVID-19 pandemic, were ready to proceed with the launch of the Mars 2020 spacecraft from Cape Canaveral, on the other side of the country.

“The people in California thought they felt an earthquake, but really they were just feeling mighty Atlas crouching down to leap off the Earth,” joked Tory Bruno, ULA’s president and CEO, in a reference to the Atlas 5 rocket.

NASA is going for its ninth successful landing on Mars with the Perseverance rover.
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Odp: [SFN] NASA’s Perseverance rover leaves Earth bound for Mars
« Odpowiedź #12 dnia: Lipiec 31, 2020, 03:21 »
NASA’s Perseverance rover leaves Earth bound for Mars (2)


Artist’s illustration of NASA’s Perseverance rover and Ingenuity Mars Helicopter. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA says it spent more than $2.4 billion to design, build and prepare the Mars 2020 mission for launch. With the money budgeted to operate the rover during the trip to Mars, and for around two Earth years (one Mars year) after landing, the total mission is expected to cost around $2.7 billion.

The 2,260-pound (1,025-kilogram) Perseverance rover is about 10 feet (3 meters) long, 9 feet (2.7 meters wide), and 7 feet (2.2 meters) tall.

The rover is mounted on a rocket-powered descent stage that will lower the robot to the Martian surface. That, in turn, is cocooned inside an aerodynamic shell and heat shield to protect the rover during entry into the atmosphere of Mars, when temperatures outside the spacecraft will reach 2,370 degrees Fahrenheit (about 1,300 degrees Celsius).

The cruise stage attached to the Mars descent vehicle will shepherd the spacecraft from Earth to Mars. The carrier module will jettison before arriving at the Red Planet, and will burn up in the Martian atmosphere.

While any space launch has some risk, landing a spacecraft on Mars is a hazardous proposition. About half of all missions that have attempted to land on Mars have failed, although NASA has succeeded five consecutive Mars landing attempts.

NASA’s Perseverance rover is the third mission to Mars to launch this month, following the July 19 takeoff of the Hope orbiter developed by the United Arab Emirates in partnership with scientists at three U.S. universities. On July 23, China launched its Tianwen 1 spacecraft, an all-in-one mission consisting of an orbiter, lander and rover.

The Hope and Tianwen 1 missions are the first probes from the UAE and China to head for Mars.

“We welcome more nations taking trips to mars and studying it and delivering the science and sharing the science with the world,” said Jim Bridenstine, who became head of NASA in 2018 after his nomination by President Donald Trump. “That’s what science is all about, of course, it’s a very uniting kind of thing.”

Bridenstine said he did not see NASA as in a competition with other nations for Mars exploration.

“This is our ninth time to go to Mars and land softly, and do robotic experiments and discovery,” he said. “So I don’t see it as a competition, but certainly we welcome more explorers to deliver more science than ever before, and we look forward to seeing what it is that they’re able to discover.”

Orbiters from the United States, the European Space Agency, and India are currently flying around Mars and observing the planet from above.

All three missions will arrive at the Red Planet next February, with the UAE’s Hope spacecraft and China’s Tianwen 1 spacecraft swinging into orbit around Mars. Several months later, Tianwen 1 will release its lander in a bid to descend to the Martian surface and deploy its rover.

If successful, China would become the second country to land and operate a mobile robot on Mars, after the United States.



This graphic illustrates the components of the Mars 2020 spacecraft, including the rover, descent stage, aeroshell and cruise stage. Locations for some of the mission’s cameras used during descent to Mars are also labeled. Credit: NASA

The Perseverance rover will aim for a direct approach to Mars, heading straight into the planet’s rarefied atmosphere next Feb. 18. Around 10 minutes before reaching the upper edge atmosphere, the spacecraft will shed the cruise stage that will have guided the rover toward Mars since its launch.

The rover’s 14.8-foot-diameter (4.5-meter) heat shield will take the brunt of the energy during the craft’s plunge into the atmosphere of Mars. While temperatures outside the heat shield reach more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, small thrusters will adjust the angle of the vehicle’s trajectory, allowing it to control lift and begin navigating toward its landing site.

Around four minutes after entering the atmosphere, the spacecraft will unfurl a 70.5-foot-diameter (21.5-meter) supersonic parachute at an altitude of about 7 miles, or 11 kilometers. Perseverance’s parachute is stronger than the one used on Curiosity, and the Mars 2020 mission will employ a new technique to deploy the chute based on the craft’s position relative to the target landing site, rather than using a timer.

That will result in a more precise landing, NASA says.

Roughly 20 seconds after deploying the parachute, the heat shield at the bottom of the spacecraft will drop away, allowing a downward-facing guidance radar and cameras to start seeing the Martian surface.

The atmosphere of Mars is much thinner than Earth’s, so a parachute by itself is unable to slow the spacecraft enough for a safe landing. The rover’s descent stage will release the backshell and parachute around 1.3 miles (2.1 kilometers) above Mars. Eight throttleable thrusters will further slow the rover’s descent from about 190 mph (306 kilometers per hour) to a speed of near zero just 66 feet (20 meters) above the surface.

During this time, advanced guidance software loaded into the rover’s flight computer will begin searching for a smooth place to set down. The new capability, named terrain relative navigation, was developed since Curiosity’s landing in 2012 and will be used on Mars for the first time with Perseverance.

It works by comparing imagery taken in real-time during descent with a map of steep slopes, boulders and other hazards pre-loaded into the computer using pictures captured from Mars orbiters. If the rover sees it is heading for dangerous terrain, it will adjust its path to reach a smoother area.

Finally, a bridle will lower the one-ton Perseverance rover to the surface of Mars using a technique called the sky crane, which engineers invented and demonstrated on the Curiosity rover’s landing in 2012. Once the rover’s six wheels touch Mars, the bridle will be cut and the descent stage will fly away to crash a safe distance away.

That all happens millions of miles from Earth, when it takes minutes for a radio signal to travel between the planets at the speed of light. That leaves no opportunity for human input once the descent begins.

“It’s basically a controlled disassembly the whole way,” Wallace told Spaceflight Now. “It’s, by far, the highest risk phase of the mission still, and we had the good fortune on Mars 2020 to have leveraged the system that we designed on Curiosity.

“So not only we do have the testing behind us on this system that we did before we launched and landed Curiosity, we have the Curiosity flight itself, and all the telemetry that came back,” he said. “And it performed extremely well during that mission. Then we did a whole lot of additional testing to launch this spacecraft.

“Still, no guarantees,” Wallace said. “Our hearts will still be beating hard when we get to that point in the mission, but I do think it’s an advantage that we have. This is not a first-time landing system as we had on Curiosity.”



On ancient Mars, water carved channels and transported sediments to form fans and deltas within lake basins. Examination of spectral data acquired from orbit show that some of these sediments have minerals that indicate chemical alteration by water. Here in Jezero Crater delta, sediments contain clays and carbonates. This false-color image combines information from two instruments on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars and the Context Camera. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/JHUAPL

The Perseverance rover will target a landing inside the 28-mile-wide (45-kilometer) Jezero Crater on Mars, home to an ancient river delta and a lake the size of Lake Tahoe that scientists believe filled the crater some 3.5 billion to 3.9 billion years ago. Scientists hope to find signatures of ancient life in the rocks and sediments deposited in the dried-up delta.

Perseverance is designed to land as close to the delta deposits as possible.

“To get down onto the crater floor right on top of the delta, we need to do better than we’ve ever done before,” Steltzner said.

Once the rover is on Mars and powers up its science instruments, one of its first tasks will be to place NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter onto the surface. Perseverance will release the rotorcraft from a carrier on its belly onto the ground, then drive away to a distance of at least 330 feet (100 meters) before the helicopter flies for the first time.

That moment will be historic. The tiny 4-pound (1.8-kilogram) robot will try to become the first aircraft to fly through the atmosphere of another planet.

“Human beings have never flown a rotorcraft outside of our own Earth’s atmosphere, so this will be very much a Wright Brothers moment, except at another planet,” said MiMi Aung, project manager for the Ingenuity helicopter at JPL.

Ground controllers will program the helicopter to perform a series of test flights during a planned 30-day campaign, beginning with a relatively simple up-and-down flight lasting less than 30 seconds, Aung said. Then the team will attempt “bolder and bolder” test flights, she told Spaceflight Now.

The helicopter will fly autonomously, without real-time input from ground controllers millions of miles away. The drone carries two cameras, and telemetry from the helicopter will be routed through a base station on the rover. The Perseverance rover also might be able to take pictures of the helicopter in flight.

“For the first time ever, we’re going to fly a helicopter on another planet,” Bridenstine said. “In the future, it could transform how we do planetary science on other worlds, and eventually it could be a scout so we can figure out where we need to send our robots.”

NASA officials approved adding the helicopter to the Mars 2020 mission in 2018. The mission cost around $80 million to design and develop, and will cost another $5 million to operate.

The atmosphere at the Martian surface is about 1 percent the density of Earth’s, limiting the performance of a rotorcraft like the Ingenuity helicopter.

The helicopter’s counter-rotating rotors will spin between 2,400 and 2,900 rpm, about 10 times faster than a helicopter flying in Earth’s atmosphere. Developed at JPL with assistance from a company named AeroVironment Inc., the Ingenuity rotorcraft is tiny compared to the Perseverance rover. The solar-powered drone measures just 1.6 feet (0.49 meters) tall, weighs about 4 pounds (1.8 kilograms), and has blades spanning about 4 feet (1.2 meters) in diameter.

While the Ingenuity helicopter is purely a technology proof-of-concept, future rotorcraft could be dispatched to other planets with more sophisticated scientific instruments.

NASA has selected a robotic mission named Dragonfly to explore Saturn’s largest moon Titan. But Titan has a much thicker atmosphere than Mars, which eases the difficulty of rotor-driven flight.

Debuting a wide array of new capabilities, the Mars 2020 mission is packed with firsts.

We’re making oxygen on the surface of Mars for the first time,” Wallace said. “For the first time we have an opportunity to use autonomous systems to avoid hazards as we land in Jezero Crater, and that’s technology that will feed forward into future robotic systems and human exploration systems.

“We’re also carrying microphones for the first time,” he said. “We’re going to hear the sounds of the spacecraft landing on another planet and the rover drilling into rocks and rolling over the surface of Mars. That’s pretty exciting.

“For the first time, we’re going to have an opportunity to see our spacecraft land another planet,” Wallace continued. “We’ve got commercial ruggedized cameras that we’ve distributed essentially all over the spacecraft, and they will get high-definition video that we’ll bring back after we land on the surface from the entire landing activity — from the inflation of the parachute to the touchdown of the rover.”
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Odp: [SFN] Mars 2020 spacecraft resumes normal operations after post-launch safe
« Odpowiedź #13 dnia: Sierpień 02, 2020, 01:43 »
NASA’s Perseverance rover leaves Earth bound for Mars (3)


NASA’s Perseverance rover is lifted during launch preparations at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Credit: NASA JPL/Christian Mangano

The Mars 2020 mission’s development cost swelled nearly $360 million over NASA’s original prediction, according to the Government Accountability Office. That was caused primarily challenges with perfecting the devices that will collect, seal and store rock specimens, along with difficulties with instruments.

“Along the way, we had plenty of challenges,” Wallace said. “We had to qualify a new planetary parachute. That’s another first — the first time we’ve done that as an agency in 40 or 50 years.

“Kind of late in the game, we were asked to accommodate this little thing called Mars Helicopter,” he said. “It was well after most of the payloads were assigned to the project, so we had to do a little bit of magic trick to get that onto the rover.”

Around the time of Curiosity’s landing on Mars in 2012, engineers at JPL started assessing options for NASA’s next major Mars rover. NASA leadership announced plans for the Mars 2020 mission in late 2012, seeking to recycle designs proven with the Curiosity mission — also known as Mars Science Laboratory — with a different set of scientific instruments, and the new ability to drill core samples, seal them inside ultra-clean tubes, and drop them onto the Red Planet to be picked up years in the future.

“We need to make the sample tubes that we take to Mars cleaner than anything that we’ve ever done before in space, and cleaner than almost everything we do here on Earth,” Steltzner said. “Part of the effort to do that involves us hyper-cleaning the sample tubes in which the samples that we take on Mars will be placed, and then placing them into the rover at last possible minute.”

Read more about the sampling system in our earlier story.

The sample tubes were installed into the Perseverance rover in May, just before it was closed up inside its aeroshell and mounted on top of the Atlas 5 rocket.

Each tube is sheathed in a gold-colored cylindrical enclosure, providing an extra layer of contamination protection. The tubes will ride to Mars inside the housing, and they will be returned to the sheath once filled with Martian rock samples.

The Perseverance rover will carry 43 sample tubes to Mars, including “witness tubes” or blanks, which will allow scientists to cross-check rock and sediment specimens returned to Earth for contamination.

The tubes are about the size and shape of a slim cigar, and the Perseverance rover will collect core samples on Mars that measure around a half-inch (13 millimeters) wide and 2.4 inches (60 millimeters) long.

“Those samples tubes are part of a Sample and Caching System, which is one of our biggest engineering developments for this mission,” Steltzner said. “We get to Mars largely like the Curiosity rover got to Mars, but we need to do something very different once we’re on Mars. We must take these core samples, seal them hermetically and sterilely, and then produce a cache of samples for eventual return to Earth.”

The Sample Caching System is a complicated piece of equipment, with 17 separate motors, a rotating wheel containing nine drill bits, and 43 tubes to hermetically seal core samples drilled from Martian rocks.

The rover has a 7-foot-long (2-meter) robotic arm with a coring drill fixed on a 99-pound (45-kilogram) turret on the end. The longer robotic arm will work in concert with a smaller 1.6-foot-long (0.5-meter) robotic manipulator inside the belly of the rover, which will pick up sample tubes for transfer to the main arm for drilling.

Steltzner said the rover’s sampling system actually consists of three different robots.

“Out at the end of our robotic arm — that’s the first robot — is a coring drill that uses rotary percussive action like we have used similarly and previously on Mars with the Curiosity mission, except rather just generating powder, this creates an annular groove in the rock and breaks off a core sample,” Steltzner said.

During each sample collection, the core sample will go directly into the tube attached to the drill.

“That bit and the sample tube are brought back by the robotic arm — our first robot — into the second robot, our bit carousel, which receives the … filled sample tube and delivers it to a very fine and detailed robot, the sample handling arm inside the belly of the beast, in which the sample is then assessed, its volume is measured, images are taken, and it is sealed and placed back into storage for eventually being placed in a cache on the surface.”

The portion of the caching system inside the rover is called the Adaptive Caching Assembly, which consists of more than 3,000 parts alone.

The design of the drill and sample tubes is intended to preserve the distribution minerals cored from Martian rocks. The system is also intended to collect samples directly from softer soils.



Ken Farley, project scientist for NASA’s Mars 2020 mission, holds a replica of a sample tube carried on the Perseverance rover. Credit: NASA TV/Spaceflight Now

NASA selected seven scientific payloads to ride to Mars on the Perseverance rover in 2014.

Two of the instruments, named PIXL and SHERLOC, are located alongside the coring drill on the robotic arm’s turret. They will scan Martian rocks to determine their chemical composition and search for organic materials, providing key inputs into decisions by ground teams on which rocks to drill.

The Mars 2020 rover also carries the SuperCam instrument, an intricate suite of sensors, including a camera, laser and spectrometers, designed to zap Martian rocks from more than 20 feet (6 meters) away to measure their chemical and mineral make-up, with the ability to identify organic molecules.

Developed by an international team in the United States, France and Spain, the SuperCam instrument is an upgraded version of the ChemCam instrument currently operating on NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover.

The instruments mounted inside the Mars 2020 rover’s main body include MOXIE, which will demonstrate the production of oxygen from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Mars, a capability that future astronaut explorers could use on the Red Planet. A Norwegian-developed ground-penetrating radar on the rover named RIMFAX will study the planet’s underground geologic structure, yielding data on subsurface layers and soil strength which could help designers of larger landers designed to carry people to Mars.

The mission also carries a weather station and 23 cameras — the most ever flown on a deep space mission — including the first camera on Mars with a zoom function. That camera system, located on top of a mast Perseverance will raise after landing, is named Mastcam-Z and will record video and 360-degree panoramas.

“We’re carrying about 50 percent more surface payload than Curiosity did, and that was, by far, the most complex thing we’ve ever done up to that point in time,” Wallace said. “We’re taking this a step further.”

The differences between Perseverance and NASA’s predecessor Curiosity rover do not stop at the science payload or the Ingenuity helicopter.

The Perseverance rover also features aluminum wheels with thicker skin and modified treads to avoid damage observed on Curiosity’s wheels on Mars. NASA’s new Mars rover weighs about 278 pounds (126 kilograms) more than Curiosity.

The benefit of another decade of technological advancement since Curiosity’s launch, and the budding fruits of NASA’s partnership with ESA on a Mars Sample Return program, moves scientists closer to addressing the question of whether life took hold elsewhere in the solar system, Bridenstine said.

“We are, in fact, trying to find signatures of life, and of course, we’re interested in finding life itself,” Bridenstine said.

While NASA officials are careful to say Perseverance is not a mission to detect life, its launch and landing on Mars will be a big leap forward in the search.

“There are so many things that are kind of building up here to say that the probability of finding life on another world is going up,” Bridenstine said. “We’re not saying it’s there. I don’t know if it’s there, and nobody else does either. But that’s really what astrobiology is all about, and Mars really gives us the best opportunity, I think, in the short term to make a significant discovery that will forever change how we think of ourselves, and forever change how we think of space exploration in general.”

Assuming Perseverance’s mission is a success, and funding and technical plans remain on track, NASA and ESA could launch missions as soon as 2026 with a European-built Mars rover to retrieve the specimens collected by the Mars 2020 mission. The rover will deliver the material to a U.S.-supplied solid-fueled booster to shoot the samples from Mars into space, a feat never before attempted on another planet.

A separate spacecraft provided by ESA will link up with the samples in orbit around Mars, then head for Earth before releasing a NASA re-entry capsule containing the Martian material to complete the first round-trip interplanetary mission no earlier than 2031.



NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover carries seven science instruments. Credit: NASA

Then scientists will get to work analyzing the samples. They will look for chemical signatures in the core samples that might suggest life once existed on Mars.

Among other objectives, NASA’s two Viking landers carried instruments to search for signs of life on Mars when they landed on the Red Planet in 1976. But the robotic landers did not produce any verifiable confirmation of life, and Mars missions since Viking have followed the trail of water, seeking evidence that the Red Planet once harbored environments that could have supported basic life forms.

After the dual successes of the Viking landers, NASA’s next mission to the Martian surface was Mars Pathfinder, which deployed a small rover just 26 inches (66 centimeters) long named Sojourner in 1997. That mission proved NASA, and more specifically engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, could build mobile robots to explore the Red Planet.

Next came the larger Spirit and Opportunity rovers, which landed at two different sites on Mars in 2004.

“Spirit and Opportunity together established that Mars truly was habitable, that it had abundant water on the surface in many forms, in the forms of large lakes, small lakes, flowing rivers, even hot springs,” said Jim Watzin, director of NASA’s Mars exploration program. “So with that knowledge in hand and the experience that we gained in operating the Spirit and Opportunity, we went and developed what has been our flagship to date, and that’s the Curiosity rover.”

Curiosity carried a more comprehensive set of instruments to Mars, including a drill to collect pulverized rock samples and deliver the material to a miniaturized laboratory. Curiosity launched in 2011 and landed inside Gale Crater on Mars in August 2012, and found rock layers at the landing site that formed in a lake that dried up billions of years ago.

The rover also discovered organic carbon — a building block of life — inside Martian rocks, and detected that ancient Mars had the right ingredients to support living microbes.

Curiosity is still operating today and slowly climbing higher on Mount Sharp, a 3.4-mile-high (5.5-kilometer) mountain towering above the crater floor.

Amid the series of rover missions, NASA also dispatched two successful stationary landers to Mars.

The Phoenix lander touched down on the northern polar plains of Mars in 2008 and dug into the soil to find water ice just below the surface. NASA’s InSight spacecraft arrived on Mars in 2018 to measure the planet’s seismology and probe its internal structure.


Source: https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/07/30/nasas-perseverance-rover-leaves-earth-bound-for-mars/

Mars 2020 spacecraft resumes normal operations after post-launch safe mode
July 31, 2020 Stephen Clark [SFN]


This illustration from NASA’s “Eyes on the Solar System” app shows the Mars 2020 spacecraft outbound from planet Earth. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance mission resumed normal operations Friday after cold temperatures forced the spacecraft into safe mode soon after a successful launch from Cape Canaveral.

“With safe mode exit, the team is getting down to the business of interplanetary cruise,” said Matt Wallace, the Mars 2020 mission’s deputy project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“Next stop, Jezero Crater,” he added, referring to the Perseverance rover’s landing site on Mars.

The $2.7 billion Mars 2020 mission lifted off from Cape Canaveral aboard a United Launch Atlas 5 rocket at 7:50 a.m. EDT (1150 GMT) Thursday. Less than an hour later, the rocket’s Centaur upper stage deployed the Mars 2020 spacecraft right on target on a trajectory to break free of Earth’s gravitational grasp and head into the solar system.

But the spacecraft, containing NASA’s Perseverance rover, detected colder temperatures than expected as it flew in Earth’s shadow, a phase of the mission known as an eclipse. After flying back into sunlight, the spacecraft powered up its radio transmitter and began sending signals to ground teams through NASA’s Deep Space Network.

The DSN antennas are tuned to listen for faint radio signals from spacecraft in distant parts of the solar system, and the powerful transmissions from the Mars 2020 spacecraft — while it was still near Earth — saturated the network’s receivers. That has happened on previous missions, NASA officials said, and ground teams soon resolved the minor issue to establish a stable lock on Mars 2020.

Separately, the Mars 2020 spacecraft autonomously went into a standby operating state known as safe mode soon after deploying from the Atlas 5 rocket. Wallace said Thursday the temperature on part of the spacecraft dipped below a preset limit, triggering the safe mode.



A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket propelled the Mars 2020 spacecraft away from Earth with a successful launch Thursday from Cape Canaveral. Credit: United Launch Alliance

In safe mode, the spacecraft reverts to a basic operating mode and turns of all but essential systems until it receives new commands from ground controllers, according to NASA.

NASA said in a statement after Thursday’s launch that the temperature disparity was in the Mars 2020 spacecraft’s liquid freon coolant loop, which dissipates heat from the center of the spacecraft through radiators on the carrier module carrying the rover to Mars.

“Chances are we may have just tightened down on that limit a little too much, and it triggered a safe mode,” Wallace told Spaceflight Now.

NASA’s Curiosity rover, upon which Perseverance was designed, did not enter the Earth’s shadow after its launch in 2011. So engineers relied on analytical modeling to predict the temperatures during the eclipse.

“We set the limits for the temperature differential conservatively tight for triggering a safe mode,” Wallace said. “The philosophy is that it is far better to trigger a safe mode event when not required, than miss one that is.”

In the coming weeks, ground teams at JPL will begin activating the spacecraft’s systems and instruments for post-launch checkouts. The testing will ensure all systems are ready for the mission’s make-or-break landing attempt on Mars planned for Feb. 18, 2021.

The one-ton Perseverance rover carries seven instruments to explore the geology and climate at the mission’s landing site inside Jezero Crater, an impact basin that once contained a lake roughly the size of Lake Tahoe. There is also evidence that an ancient river flowed into the lake more than 3.5 billion years ago, leaving behind a dried-up river delta, where sedimentary rock deposits may contains signs of past life.

The six-wheeled robot will drive across the delta, and scientists will use data from the rover to select rocks for the craft’s sample collection drill. The drill will extract core samples for storage inside small tubes carried to Mars aboard the rover.

A future mission will retrieve the sample tubes and return the Martian rock specimens to Earth for detailed analysis.

The Perseverance rover also carries NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter, a tiny rotorcraft that will attempt to become the first vehicle of its kind to fly in the atmosphere of another planet.


Source: https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/07/31/mars-2020-spacecraft-resumes-normal-operations-after-post-launch-safe-mode/
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Odp: [JPL] NASA Announces Landing Site for Mars 2020 Rover
« Odpowiedź #14 dnia: Sierpień 22, 2020, 04:30 »

  Myślę, że to miejsce może być podobne do Ares vallis, miejsca, w którym Mars Pathfinder wylądował w 1997 roku, miejmy nadzieję, że z dobrymi wynikami i nowymi cudami do odkrycia

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Odp: [JPL] NASA Announces Landing Site for Mars 2020 Rover
« Odpowiedź #14 dnia: Sierpień 22, 2020, 04:30 »