Polskie Forum Astronautyczne
Artykuły o tematyce astronautycznej => Artykuły astronautyczne => Wątek zaczęty przez: Orionid w Listopada 20, 2018, 17:26
-
NASA Announces Landing Site for Mars 2020 Rover
NOVEMBER 19, 2018
(https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/mars2020/20181119/JezeroCrater.jpg)
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
(https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/styles/full_width/public/thumbnails/image/image2-molamap.jpg?itok=dYcH2XMi)
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 (https://www.nasa.gov/mars2020/) 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.
(https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/mars2020/20181119/Mars2020-Landing-Technique-animated.gif)
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 (https://www.nasa.gov/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 (https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/mission/technology/entry-descent-landing/) (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 (https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7286)
-
NASA selects landing site for Mars 2020 rover
by Jeff Foust — November 19, 2018 [SpaceNews]
(https://spacenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/mars2020.jpg)
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 (https://spacenews.com/nasa-proposes-rapid-mars-sample-return-architecture/) 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 (https://spacenews.com/nasa-selects-landing-site-for-mars-2020-rover/)
-
NASA dealing with cost growth on planetary science flagship missions
by Jeff Foust — March 19, 2019 [SpaceNews]
(https://spacenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/mars2020.jpg)
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 (https://spacenews.com/mars-2020-rover-mission-to-cost-more-than-2-billion/). 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 (https://spacenews.com/nasa-to-replace-europa-clipper-instrument/). 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” (https://www.lpi.usra.edu/opag/meetings/mar2019/Findings.pdf) 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/
-
NASA's Mars Helicopter Completes Flight Tests
MARCH 28, 2019 [JPL]
(https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/images/largesize/PIA23157_hires.jpg)
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
-
NASA’s next Mars rover will soon ship to Cape Canaveral launch site
January 2, 2020 Stephen Clark [SFN]
(https://mk0spaceflightnoa02a.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/mars_2020-17.jpg)
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.
(https://mk0spaceflightnoa02a.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/mars_2020-9.jpg)
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.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrF5YwR-j24
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrF5YwR-j24&feature=emb_title
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.
(https://mk0spaceflightnoa02a.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/mars_2020-6.jpg)
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.
(https://mk0spaceflightnoa02a.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/mars_2020-4.jpg)
The Mars 2020 rover. Credit: Alex Polimeni / Spaceflight Now
(https://mk0spaceflightnoa02a.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/mars_2020-3.jpg)
The Mars 2020 rover. Credit: Alex Polimeni / Spaceflight Now
(https://mk0spaceflightnoa02a.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/mars_2020-7.jpg)
The Mars 2020 rover. Credit: Alex Polimeni / Spaceflight Now
(https://mk0spaceflightnoa02a.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/mars_2020-11.jpg)
The Mars 2020 rover. Credit: Alex Polimeni / Spaceflight Now
(https://mk0spaceflightnoa02a.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/mars_2020-12.jpg)
The Mars 2020 descent stage. Credit: Alex Polimeni / Spaceflight Now
(https://mk0spaceflightnoa02a.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/mars_2020-16.jpg)
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/
-
Mars 2020 rover arrives at Kennedy Space Center for July launch
February 14, 2020 Stephen Clark [SFN]
(https://mk0spaceflightnoa02a.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/KSC-20200212-PH-CSH01_0037large.jpg)
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.
(https://mk0spaceflightnoa02a.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/PIA23491orig.jpg)
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.
(https://mk0spaceflightnoa02a.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/KSC-20200212-PH-CSH01_0007large.jpg)
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/
-
Seventh-grader wins contest to name new Mars rover: Perseverance
March 5, 2020 William Harwood [SFN]
(https://mk0spaceflightnoa02a.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/49624304487_96c6b48ddb_k.jpg)
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.
(https://mk0spaceflightnoa02a.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/ESXggb3U0AAgDs4.jpg)
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.
(https://mk0spaceflightnoa02a.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/PIA23491orig.jpg)
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/
-
“Overstressed” NASA Mars exploration budget threatens missions
by Jeff Foust — March 19, 2020 [SN]
(https://spacenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/mars2020-march20-879x485.jpg)
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/
-
Niezłe byłyby jaja gdyby Curiosity po roku fiskalnym 2021 nie miałby finansowania >:( Mam nadzieję że nie dojdzie do takiej sytuacji.
-
Mars 2020 launch slips three days
by Jeff Foust — June 11, 2020 [SN]
(https://spacenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/atlas5-mars2020.jpg)
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/
-
Mars 2020 rover mission to cost more than $2 billion
by Jeff Foust — July 20, 2016 [SN]
(https://spacenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/earthreturnorbiter-879x485.jpg)
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/
-
Atlas 5 launches Mars 2020 mission
by Jeff Foust — July 30, 2020 [SN]
(https://spacenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/mars2020-launch2.jpg)
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 (https://spacenews.com/nasa-and-esa-outline-cost-of-mars-sample-return/).
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]
(https://mk0spaceflightnoa02a.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/mars_2020_launch-1-1.jpg)
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.”
(https://mk0spaceflightnoa02a.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/av088_.jpg)
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.
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.”
#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.
-
NASA’s Perseverance rover leaves Earth bound for Mars (2)
(https://mk0spaceflightnoa02a.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/m2020art.jpg)
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.
(https://mk0spaceflightnoa02a.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/mars2020cameras.jpg)
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.”
(https://mk0spaceflightnoa02a.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/image3-jezerocrater.jpg)
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.”
-
NASA’s Perseverance rover leaves Earth bound for Mars (3)
(https://mk0spaceflightnoa02a.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/PIA23829large-3.jpg)
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 (https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/06/16/with-super-clean-sample-tubes-installed-nasas-next-mars-rover-nearly-buttoned-up-for-launch/).
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.
(https://mk0spaceflightnoa02a.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/m2020tube.jpg)
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.
(https://mk0spaceflightnoa02a.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/m2020instruments.jpg)
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]
(https://mk0spaceflightnoa02a.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/m2020cruise1.jpg)
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.
(https://mk0spaceflightnoa02a.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/50174452982_7ccec1ce5b_k.jpg)
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/
-
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
-
Perseverance lands on Mars
by Jeff Foust — February 18, 2021 [SN]
Updated 7:50 p.m. Eastern after post-landing briefing.
(https://spacenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/mars2020-landing-879x485.jpg)
An illustration of the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover being lowered to the surface by the "skycrane" landing system. That landing is scheduled for Feb. 18. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
WASHINGTON — NASA’s Perseverance rover successfully landed on Mars Feb. 18, completing a nearly seven-month journey from Earth and beginning a years-long exploration of the red planet.
Perseverance touched down at Jezero Crater on Mars at 3:55 p.m. Eastern, seven minutes after the rover, encapsulated within a heatshield and backshell, entered the Martian atmosphere. The entry, descent and landing appeared to go according to plan, punctuated with a “Touchdown confirmed!” call in mission control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
“Wow. Just an amazing, incredible day,” NASA Acting Administrator Steve Jurczyk said at a post-landing briefing at JPL. “I could not be more proud of the team and what they’ve accomplished under challenging circumstances.”
The rover landed about 1.7 kilometers southeast of the center of the landing zone, said Allen Chen, the entry, descent and landing lead for Perseverance at JPL during the post-landing briefing. The spacecraft’s terrain relative navigation system, which matches images taken as it descends against on onboard map, helped guide the rover to a flat landing area, avoiding rocky, hazardous terrain.
(https://spacenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/mars2020-1stimage.jpg)
The first image taken by a hazard camera, or hazcam, on the Perseverance rover after landing on Mars. Credit: NASA/JPL
“We landed in an area that’s relatively rugged,” he said, showing a map with safe areas in blue and hazardous ones in red. “The system managed to find a nice blue spot in the midst of all that red, all that death that’s out there for us. We found a parking lot.”
The rover returned a pair of images from hazard cameras, or hazcams, on the front and rear of the rover. That allowed the mission team to determine the orientation of the rover, which is also on a flat surface with a tilt of only about 1.2 degrees. “Everything looks great” on the rover, said Jennifer Trosper, deputy project manager. Additional images will come back from the rover, as well as those collected during landing, over the next few days.
The rover will also start deploying equipment such as a high-gain antenna and the mast on which several instruments are mounted. “We’re excited to be opening up the rover over the next few days,” she said.
Science, sample collection and tech demos
The $2.7 billion mission, known as Mars 2020, launched July 30 of last year on a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5. Now on the surface, it will operate for at least one Martian year — nearly two Earth years — and likely for far longer, barring any technical issues.
Perseverance is NASA’s fifth Mars rover, dating back to the Sojourner rover flown on the Mars Pathfinder mission that landed in 1997, and is by far the most sophisticated. While similar to size to the Curiosity rover that has been on Mars since 2012, the 1,025-kilogram Perseverance is about 100 kilograms heavier and has a payload of science instruments and technology demonstrations 50% larger.
Most of that payload will be devoted to studies of the landing site and surrounding region, looking for evidence of past Martian life. Scientists will also use the rover’s instruments to characterize the planet’s geology and climate.
(https://spacenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/mars2020-celebrate.jpg)
Adam Steltzner (right), Perseverance chief engineer, celebrates with other members of the mission team after receiving word that the rover safely landed on Mars Feb. 18. Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls
A key aspect of that science mission will be to collect samples of a wide range of Martian rocks, including those that scientists believe contain biosignatures, or evidence of past life. Perseverance will cache those samples, either in selected locations on the surface or on the rover itself, to be returned to Earth by two later missions that will launch no earlier than 2026 as part of the broader Mars Sample Return campaign NASA is conducting in cooperation with the European Space Agency.
Scientists hope that either the instruments on Perseverance, or the samples brought back to Earth for analysis in terrestrial labs in the 2030s, will turn up evidence of past life. But they also acknowledge that the samples might find no evidence of such life. If that happens, “it would suggest that not all habitable environments that exist are inhabited,” said Ken Farley, Mars 2020 project scientist, at a Feb. 17 briefing. “We just can’t assume that everywhere that is habitable has had life originate and thrive in it.”
“I don’t necessarily think it would be the end of exploration on Mars and looking for life on Mars,” added Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division. “We would need to keep looking, and look harder, maybe in other places.”
Besides looking for evidence of past life, Perseverance is also a step toward future life in the form of human missions. One payload on the rover, called MOXIE, will test the ability to convert carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into oxygen for life support and propellant. The rover will also deploy a small helicopter, called Ingenuity, that will attempt the first powered flight in the Martian atmosphere. Such vehicles could serve as scouts for astronauts on future missions.
“This rover has a substantial amount of feed-forward technology on it,” said Matt Wallace, deputy project manager for Mars 2020, at a Feb. 17 webinar by the National Academies’ Space Studies Board. He worked on NASA’s four previous Mars rovers, from Sojourner to Curiosity. “This is really the first one that I think of as a human precursor mission.”
“Now that we’re on the ground,” Glaze said at the post-landing briefing, “the fun really starts.”
Source: https://spacenews.com/perseverance-lands-on-mars/
-
The multi-decade challenge of Mars Sample Return
by Jeff Foust — February 18, 2021 [SN]
A version of this article originally appeared in the Jan. 18, 2021 issue of SpaceNews magazine.
(https://spacenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/3-Ellipse_Map_v3_PartialAnnotation-879x485.jpg)
NASA’s Perseverance rover is due to touch down Feb. 18 in Mars’ Jezero Crater, the site of an ancient lake and river delta which could harbor signs of fossilized microbial life. Credit: ESA/DLR/FU-BERLIN/NASA/JPL-CALTECH
This month the Martian invasion fleet arrives — the fleet of terrestrial spacecraft invading Mars, that is.
On Feb. 9, Hope, the United Arab Emirates’ first mission to Mars, entered orbit around the planet to study its atmosphere. The next day, Tianwen-1, China’s first dedicated Mars mission, arrived, entering orbit to identify a target for its lander and rover, which will attempt a landing in May.
On Feb. 18, it’s NASA’s turn. The Mars 2020 spacecraft arrives at Mars, due to land at Jezero Crater. The landing will feature the same “seven minutes of terror” as the Curiosity rover experienced in 2012, and Mars 2020’s Perseverance rover looks much like its predecessor. Its mission, though, is quite different and, in many respects, won’t end for at least a decade, when the samples it collects arrive back on Earth.
The logical next step in Mars exploration
When NASA announced in late 2012 it would fly Mars 2020, it based its decision on the planetary science decadal survey in 2011. That study ranked as its highest priority flagship-class mission a concept called Mars Astrobiology Explorer Cacher (MAX-C), a rover that would study the planet’s habitability and also collect, or cache, samples for return to Earth by later missions.
“The Mars community, in their inputs to the decadal survey, was emphatic in their view that a sample return mission is the logical next step in Mars exploration,” the survey’s final report noted.
The study acknowledged that MAX-C would be just the first step in getting those samples back to Earth. NASA would need to fly later missions to collect and return the cached samples, but those were beyond the scope of the decadal survey, which was limited to missions expected to launch between 2013 and 2022.
(https://spacenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/PERSERVERANCE-WITH-TUBES-380x214.jpg)
NASA’s Perseverance rover will store rock and soil samples in sealed tubes for future retrieval. NASA’s share of the joint retrieval missions could cost $3.8 billion to $4.4 billion. Credit: NASA/JPL-CALTECH
NASA got serious about planning for those future missions in 2017, when it announced what it called a “lean” sample return architecture. It was not that different, though, from earlier concepts, calling for two additional missions. One would land near Mars 2020 and deploy a “fetch rover” to collect the samples cached by the earlier mission. That rover would return the samples to the lander, load them into a small rocket called a Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV) and launch them into orbit. A second mission, an orbiter, would collect the sample container launched by the MAV and return it to Earth.
By the time Mars 2020 launched in July, NASA had refined that architecture and also brought on board the European Space Agency, which would lead development of the orbiter mission and provide the fetch rover for the NASA-led lander. Airbus Defence and Space received an ESA contract in October for the orbiter, valued at 491 million euros ($595 million.)
When Mars 2020 launched, NASA planned to move the Mars Sample Return program into Phase A of development around September. But in August, the agency announced it would first conduct an independent review of the program. Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, requested the review based on the experience with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (formerly WFIRST), which had a similar review in 2017 that identified cost and technical issues with the mission.
“The primary objectives are to make sure we’re on a good footing going forward and that we have the resources we need to execute the mission and be successful,” said Jeff Gramling, Mars Sample Return program director at NASA Headquarters, when NASA announced the study.
Proceed with caution
The independent review board (IRB) was led by David Thompson, the retired president and chief executive of Orbital ATK, with a team of engineers and scientists from both inside and outside NASA. They worked for two months on the study, which was released, along with the agency’s response, Nov. 10.
The good news for NASA was that the independent study vigorously backed Mars Sample Return. “We unanimously believe that the Mars Sample Return program should proceed,” Thompson said in a call with reporters about the study. “We think its scientific value would be extraordinarily high.”
“Full steam ahead,” added Maria Zuber, a planetary scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who served on the independent review and also chairs a separate standing review board for the program.
The study, though, took issue with some of NASA’s plans for Mars Sample Return, including its schedule. The architecture NASA presented to the independent review was one sometimes called “26-26-31” by the agency: both the lander and orbiter would launch in 2026, with the samples returned in 2031.
That schedule was too aggressive for the independent panel. “The schedules required to support launches in 2026 were substantially shorter than the actual experience from recent, somewhat similar programs,” like Mars 2020 and Curiosity, Thompson said.
Under a revised schedule recommended by the panel, the lander mission would launch in 2028. The orbiter could launch in either 2027 or 2028, since its use of electric propulsion gives it the flexibility to pursue alternative trajectories. That revised schedule would delay the return of the samples until 2033.
At the same time, the study warned about delaying the missions beyond 2028. “The conditions when you arrive at Mars change dramatically over the Martian year,” explained Peter Theisinger of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a member of the IRB who previously managed the Curiosity mission.
“Launch opportunities after 2028 don’t arrive at a very attractive season,” he added, with the potential for dust storms like the one in 2018 that led to the demise of the solar-powered Opportunity rover, and other changes in the atmosphere that would complicate the landing. “A significant redesign for the early ’30s would be required, and we want to avoid doing that in the middle of the program.”
The independent panel, though, wasn’t shy about suggesting changes to the mission in this early design phase. Thompson put a particular emphasis on studies examining whether the lander mission should be split into two: one carrying the fetch rover and the other the MAV. It also recommended looking at adding a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) to the lander, or at least the lander with the MAV, to ensure sufficient power and to keep the rocket’s propulsion system from getting too cold.
(https://spacenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Zurbuchen_Mars-2020-briefing-380x231.jpg)
Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, announcing the official name of the Mars 2020 rover last March at NASA Headquarters. Credit: NASA/Aubrey Gemignani
There’s also the issue of cost. NASA had been reticent to discuss the cost of Mars Sample Return since it was still far from the point where NASA makes a formal cost commitment. Zurbuchen, speaking at a Mars 2020 prelaunch briefing, estimated NASA’s cost of the later phases of the program would be $2.5 billion to $3 billion, a figure that didn’t include the $2.4 billion spent on Mars 2020 or ESA’s estimated contribution of 1.5 billion euros.
Thompson said that NASA’s cost estimates at the time of the independent review were $2.9 billion to $3.3 billion at a confidence level of 50%. That was too low, especially if the launches were delayed to 2028. “We concluded the total budget, to get into the range of a 70-80% confidence level, should be increased by about a billion dollars,” he said, or to about $3.8 billion to $4.4 billion.
Balancing the portfolio
NASA welcomed the independent review board’s report but stopped short of endorsing some of its biggest recommendations, particularly on cost and schedule. “It requires bringing with us a community,” said Zurbuchen, including ESA as well as Congress, which will have to agree to any delays and additional costs. He suggested “a time scale of a year or so” before NASA makes any decision on delaying the missions or increasing the program’s budget.
That decision will be informed by studies done under Phase A of the program, which formally started Dec. 17. That will further refine the design of the missions and address some of the issues raised by the independent review.
The planetary science community, meanwhile, is nervously watching the status of Mars Sample Return and the effect it could have on other parts of the field. Increased costs could take money away from other planetary programs, as well as make it unlikely other Mars missions would fly this decade.
Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division, addressed that at a town hall meeting during the American Geophysical Union’s Fall Meeting in December. “I certainly do recognize and understand that it’s critically important that we maintain the balance within the portfolio and that we continue to have funding to support the other missions throughout the solar system,” she said.
That balance will also be affected by the recommendations of the next planetary science decadal survey, currently underway and scheduled for release in March 2022. The decadal won’t attempt to prioritize Mars Sample Return against other missions, said David Smith, study director for the decadal at the National Academies, but “we are encouraged to comment on NASA’s current plans to implement the second and third phases of a Mars sample return campaign.”
The previous decadal survey anticipated that when it endorsed the MAX-C mission. “The committee has therefore taken the unusual step of recommending a plan for the coming decade that also has significant budget implications for one or even two decades beyond,” the report stated. “The committee does this intentionally and explicitly, with the realization that important multi-decade efforts like Mars Sample Return can come about only if such recommendations are made and followed.”
Making such recommendations is easy enough. Following them, as Mars Sample Return shows, can be much more challenging.
Source: https://spacenews.com/the-multi-decade-challenge-of-mars-sample-return/
-
Helicopter and other technology demos hitch a ride on Mars 2020
by Jeff Foust — February 18, 2021
(https://spacenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/ingenuity-879x485.jpg)
NASA plans to perform up to five flights of the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars after it’s deployed from the Perseverance rover. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
WASHINGTON — While the primary focus of the Mars 2020 mission will be the search for evidence of past Martian life, the rover mission carries several other payloads that could support future robotic and human missions to the red planet.
Perhaps the highest profile of these payloads is a small helicopter, called Ingenuity, that will attempt to make the first powered flight in the Martian atmosphere. The 1.8-kilogram helicopter, attached to the belly of the Perseverance rover, will be deployed early in the mission for flight tests.
“Mars Helicopter is a technology demonstration motivated by the potential to add an aerial dimension to space exploration,” MiMi Aung, project manager for Ingenuity at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said at a Feb. 16 briefing. “It’s been fully tested as much as we can on Earth. Next, it’s time to demonstrate, prove and learn how it operates on Mars.”
After the Perseverance rover lands, it will drive to a nearby location that controllers believe is best suited for the helicopter test. It will release Ingenuity, a complex process that takes about 10 days to complete, then drive a safe distance away.
A first flight will go to an altitude of three meters, hovering for 20 seconds before landing. “It will truly be a Wright Brothers’ moment, but on another planet,” she said.
If successful, up to four more flights could follow over 30 days. Those flights, up to 90 seconds long, will go to altitudes of three to five meters and travel as much as 50 meters downrange, returning to an “airfield” landing zone 10 meters on a side.
The $85 million project, intended as a technology demonstration, has not been without controversy. Some scientists involved with Mars 2020 opposed the inclusion of the helicopter, arguing that those tests would take time away from rover operations during the initial phases of the mission. However, with the support of then NASA Administration Jim Bridenstine, the agency decided in May 2018 to fly the helicopter (https://spacenews.com/nasa-agrees-to-fly-helicopter-demo-on-mars-2020/), later named Ingenuity, on the mission.
If successful, Ingenuity could pave the way for flying more advanced helicopters on future robotic and crewed missions, serving as scouts. “I think Ingenuity is today’s Sojourner,” said Matt Wallace, deputy project manager for Mars 2020, during a Feb. 17 briefing. Sojourner was NASA’s first Mars rover, flown on the Mars Pathfinder mission that landed in 1997.
Wallace, who worked on Sojourner, recalled there was skepticism at the time of the Mars Pathfinder mission whether a rover would be useful. “We found very quickly that having a mobile capability on the surface of Mars was incredibly valuable,” he said. “I think in almost every way, when you look at Ingenuity, it looks very much the same.”
On Perseverance itself, most of its payloads are science instruments intended to study the planet and look for evidence of past life. One, though, is a demonstration of technology for producing oxygen on Mars. The Mars Oxygen In Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) Experiment, or MOXIE, will attempt to convert carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere into oxygen.
Such a technology is critical for future human missions to Mars, enabling crews to produce oxygen needed for both life support and propellant. The use of ISRU technologies for propellant production in particular makes human missions much more feasible, noted Jeff Sheehy, chief engineer for NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, at a Feb. 16 briefing.
MOXIE will be turned on three times in the first 30 days after landing, with the first two to test the payload. “On the third run, we’ll actually make oxygen under some conservative operating conditions,” Sheehy said. MOXIE will be run at least 10 times over the course the mission, testing its ability to produce oxygen at different times of day and seasons of the year.
Each run of MOXIE will be about an hour, producing 6 to 10 grams of oxygen. The technology would need to be scaled up by about a factor of 200 for use on future crewed missions, but the agency hopes to at least prove the technology works on this mission.
The experiment did face a number of development changes that raised questions about whether it could be flown on Mars 2020. “There were times where some of the managers worried that the technology couldn’t be developed in time to get it on the rover,” he said. “There’s no question that the team that designed, built and tested MOXIE needed a lot of moxie to overcome all the challenges that were encountered along the way.”
Another instrument, SuperCam, features a laser that will be used to zap rocks, allowing it to analyze its chemical composition. An additional aspect of that instrument is a microphone that will listen as the laser fires, which can give scientists clues to the hardness and other properties of the rocks.
The microphone will have other applications as well. “It will listen to the wind, listen to the rover and also the infrared laser,” Sylvestre Maurice, deputy principal investigator for SuperCam, at a Feb. 16 briefing. “It’s the first time that we’ll have a microphone on Mars.”
The microphone, he said, will allow scientists to study atmospheric turbulence by listening to the wind. In the tenuous atmosphere of Mars, sound propagates differently from Earth, doing so at slower speeds and supporting lower frequencies better than higher ones. The microphone can also provide diagnostic information about the rover itself. “It’s opening a new world,” Maurice said.
Source: https://spacenews.com/helicopter-and-other-technology-demos-hitch-a-ride-on-mars-2020/
-
Perseverance makes its first drive on Mars
by Jeff Foust — March 6, 2021 [SN]
(https://spacenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/mars2020-firsttracks-879x485.jpg)
The Perseverance Mars rover took this image of tracks it made after its first drive on the Martian surface March 4. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
WASHINGTON — NASA’s Perseverance rover has started moving on the Martian surface as project scientists prepare to send the rover toward the remnants of a river delta in search of signs of past life.
At a March 5 press briefing at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, project officials said that the rover made its first movements since landing in Jezero Crater Feb. 18. The rover moved forward four meters, turned 150 degrees to the left, and then went back 2.5 meters.
“Our first drive went incredibly well,” said Anais Zarifian, Perseverance mobility test bed engineer, at the briefing. During the drive, the rover took images that showed the tracks left by its wheels. “I don’t think I’ve ever been happier to see wheel tracks.”
That first drive by the rover is part of ongoing checkouts of the rover and its suite of instruments. “We haven’t had any hardware issues. Everything has been working that we’ve been checking out,” said Robert Hogg, Perseverance deputy mission manager, at the briefing. “It’s actually been amazingly smooth.”
As engineers test the rover’s systems, scientists are planning the rover’s trek to a delta that is a high priority region for the rover to explore. Katie Stack Morgan, Perseverance deputy project scientist, said at the briefing that they’ve mapped two potential paths from the landing site — which the mission has named Octavia E. Butler Landing after the science-fiction author — to the base of the delta.
“We’re right in the middle of conversations” with rover planners on the best route and how long it will take to get to the delta, she said. That includes weighing the terrain against science that can be done along the way: while one route is relatively smooth, it’s less scientifically interesting than the other route goes past some deposits that offer a preview of the delta.
That trip to the delta will take place after Perseverance deploys Ingenuity, the small helicopter attached to the rover’s undercarriage, and observes a series of flight tests Ingenuity performs scheduled to last 30 days. Hogg said engineers are still scouting for a location to perform those flight tests, using images from the rover.
“We’re still analyzing various areas to determine the best place to do that,” he said. “We hope to get the whole helicopter thing going before spring is over.” Once the flight tests are done, the rover will head toward the delta.
Engineers continue to test some of the rover’s systems, including those that will be used to collect samples. Hogg said commissioning of the sample collection system will be completed after the helicopter tests.
One of the primary goals of the Mars 2020 mission is to cache samples for later return to Earth. With Perseverance safely on the surface, NASA is moving ahead with aspects of future missions needed to return those samples. On March 4, NASA awarded Northrop Grumman a contract worth up to $84.5 million to provide the propulsion for the rocket, called the Mars Ascent Vehicle, that will carry the samples from the surface into Mars orbit. That vehicle will be flown to Mars on a lander mission scheduled for launch no earlier than 2026.
“We’ve been thinking on the science team about notional samples to collect in Jezero Crater for years now, and thinking about the potential for Mars sample return,” Stack Morgan said. Now, she said, they can see the actual rocks they may sample through the eyes of the rover. “We’re talking about real rocks now, and that’s so exciting for us on the science team.”
“This is one for the ages for JPL and NASA. We’ve been talking about this for decades,” Hogg said, even though it will still be at least a decade before those samples are back on Earth. “Even though it seems like a long time away, it’s going to pass in a blink of an eye.”
Source: https://spacenews.com/perseverance-makes-its-first-drive-on-mars/
-
Ingenuity helicopter prepares for first flight on Mars
by Jeff Foust — March 23, 2021
(https://spacenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/ingenuity-inflight-879x485.jpg)
An illustration of the Ingenuity helicopter in flight on Mars, observed by the Perseverance rover. Flight tests of Ingenuity are scheduled to begin in early April and last one month. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
WASHINGTON — A small helicopter that hitched a ride on NASA’s Perseverance rover will attempt its first flight on Mars in early April, demonstrating technology that could be used on future missions.
At a March 23 briefing, NASA officials discussed plans to perform the first flights of Ingenuity, a 1.8-kilogram helicopter currently attached to the underside of Perseverance. On March 21, spacecraft controllers started the process of deploying Ingenuity by jettisoning a cover that protected the vehicle during flight.
Perseverance is in the process of driving to an “airfield,” a flat area 10 by 10 meters. Over the course of 10 days, the spacecraft will perform a series of deployments to unfold Ingenuity and drop it on the surface. “That’s a very prescribed and meticulous process,” said Farah Alibay, Perseverance integration lead for Ingenuity at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, involving separating a sequence of attachments, all documented using cameras on the rover.
The rover will drive away and, once Ingenuity’s solar panel charges up its battery, it will be ready for its first flight. “The first flight is special. It’s by far the most important flight that we plan to do,” said Håvard Grip, Ingenuity chief pilot. “It will be the first powered flight by an aircraft on another planet.”
On that flight, tentatively scheduled for April 8, Ingenuity will take off and climb to an altitude of three meters. It will then hover in place for 30 seconds while turning, then land. Project officials call that flight a “Wright Brothers moment” and, to demonstrate that connection, included a swatch of fabric, the size of a postage stamp, from the original Wright Brothers’ Flyer on Ingenuity.
If that first flight is successful, the project will attempt up to four more over the next month of increasing duration. Ingenuity can fly for up to 90 seconds at a time, with plans to go to altitudes of about five meters and travel as much as 50 meters downrange and back.
Ingenuity was extensively tested on the ground, including flight tests in vacuum chambers to simulate Martian atmospheric conditions, but project officials said those demonstrations could not test everything. “The biggest challenge will be that we are flying in the atmosphere of Mars, which has its own dynamics, its own winds, wind gusts and so forth,” said J. (Bob) Balaram, Ingenuity chief engineer. “There’s nothing that beats actually being in the real environment of Mars.”
The $85 million Ingenuity is solely a technology demonstration. Even if the helicopter performs its series of flights flawlessly, there are no plans to extend the mission beyond the 31 days allocated for flights. That’s because NASA wants Perseverance, which will observe the flights from a safe distance, to move ahead with its primary science mission.
“It’s the month of Ingenuity,” said Bobby Braun, director for planetary science at JPL. “We also have a science mission to conduct, a very important science mission that’s going to gather the samples that will eventually come back to Earth as part of the Mars Sample Return campaign. So, that month is our window to conduct the technology demonstration experiment, and we’re confident that we can do so.”
There are no firm plans to send helicopters like Ingenuity to Mars on future missions, but Braun argued that a successful demonstration might be analogous to Sojourner, the small rover that was part of the Mars Pathfinder lander mission in 1997. “Sojourner demonstrated the value of surface mobility,” he said. “In the same spirit, I can only imagine where we may be a decade or so from now.”
NASA is already pursuing another mission that will fly through the atmosphere of another world. Dragonfly will go to Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, and fly like a drone in its dense atmosphere to hop from one location to another. Balaram said the project has been in discussions with the Dragonfly on topics like development of a test program.
“It’s going to be really interesting to see how this kind of capability will scale up,” said Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division. “What we learn from this experiment will definitely feed forward.”
Source: https://spacenews.com/ingenuity-helicopter-prepares-for-first-flight-on-mars/
-
NASA primed for historic flight of experimental Mars helicopter
March 26, 2021 Stephen Clark [SFN]
(https://mk0spaceflightnoa02a.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/jpegPIA24466.width-1320.jpg)
An artist’s illustration of the Ingenuity Helicopter flying on Mars. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
NASA’s Perseverance rover will soon release a small rotorcraft onto the surface of Mars and drive a safe distance away to observe a series of historic test flights in the ultra-thin Martian atmosphere, which could begin around April 8, officials said this week.
The Mars Helicopter, named Ingenuity, has been stowed underneath the deck of the Perseverance rover for nearly one year. Ground crews at the Kennedy Space Center installed the 4-pound (1.8-kilogram) rotorcraft onto the belly of the rover April 6, 2020, during preparations for Perseverance’s launch last July.
Controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are now preparing to send commands to release the Ingenuity helicopter. The rover released a debris cover March 21 to reveal the helicopter. The carbon-fiber shield protected Ingenuity from rocks and dust kicked up during the rover’s landing on Mars on Feb. 18.
The rotorcraft was a relatively late addition to Perseverance’s mission. NASA approved the helicopter technology demonstration to fly to Mars with the Perseverance rover in 2018, just two years before launch.
NASA spent $80 million developing and building the helicopter, which will stand about 1.6 feet (0.5 meters) tall and has counter-rotating rotors that will span about 4 feet (1.2 meters) tip-to-tip. Another $5 million is devoted to operating the helicopter during a 31-day test campaign, which officially begins when Perseverance releases Ingenuity in the coming days.
Ingenuity’s test flight is scheduled for around April 8, but that date could change as the helicopter goes through its deployment and testing milestones, according to Bob Balaram, helicopoter’s chief engineer at JPL.
The helicopter’s first hop is designed to reach an altitude of about 10 feet, or 3 meters. Ingenuity will hover in place for about 30 seconds, then make a turn while it’s hovering before descending back to the surface of Mars.
“The first flight is special,” said Håvard Grip, Ingenuity’s chief pilot at JPL, during a press conference Tuesday. “It’s by far the most important flight that we plan to do. It will be the first powered flight by an aircraft on another planet.”
Bobby Braun, director of planetary science at JPL, said the helicopter and its support team back on Earth will attempt to produce a “Wright brothers’ moment” on another world.
Recognizing Ingenuity’s flight as another aviation first, NASA installed a postage stamp-size piece of fabric from the Wright brothers’ first aircraft, known as the Flyer, onto the Mars helicopter. The fabric covered one of the aircraft’s wings during its first flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on Dec. 17, 1903.
Another piece of fabric and a fragment of spruce wood from the Wright Flyer flew to the moon on the Apollo 11 mission in 1969. While the Wright brothers used fabric and wood for their aircraft, Ingenuity is made of carbon-fiber skins and “exotic metals,” Balaram said.
“This is, in effect, an aircraft that also happens to be a spacecraft,” Balaram said. “It has survived launch. It has survived the journey through space, the vacuum and radiation, it has survived the entry, descent and landing onto the surface on the bottom of the Perseverance rover, and it has survived all the challenges and design issues that are necessary for a spacecraft.
“But most of all I think of Ingenuity also as an experimental aircraft,” he said.
The surface pressure of the Martian atmosphere is about 1% that of Earth’s, meaning Ingenuity’s rotors will have to generate extra lift to allow the helicopter to take off. The Mars helicopter’s rotors will spin about five-to-ten times faster than a typical helicopter flying in Earth’s atmosphere.
Lori Glaze, head of NASA’s planetary science division, described the Ingenuity helicopter as a “high-risk, high-reward” experiment that could pave the way for future aerial vehicles to explore Mars and other planets.
Before it can attempt to make history, the helicopter will through a series of deployment and checkout steps. It will take about six days to fully release the rotorcraft from the rover, first releasing a launch lock that kept Ingenuity firmly attached to the rover during the trip to Mars.
Then a pyrotechnic device will cut a table to allow Ingenuity to begin rotating out of its horizontal position, and the helicopter will extend two of its four landing legs. By the third day, an electric motor will fully rotate Ingenuity into a vertical orientation underneath the rover, and the other two landing legs will unfurl into position on the fourth day of the helicopter’s deployment sequence, according to NASA.
At that point, the helicopter will remain attached to the rover by a single bolt and a couple of tiny electrical connectors, NASA said.
(https://mk0spaceflightnoa02a.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/jpegPIA24448.width-1320.jpg)
The debris shield, a protective covering on the bottom of NASA’s Perseverance rover, was released on March 21. The debris shield protected the agency’s Ingenuity helicopter during landing, and its removal allows NASA to proceed with deployment of the helicopter on the surface of Mars. This image was taken by a camera on the end of the Perseverance rover’s robotic arm. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
NASA says a wide angle camera at the end of the rover’s robotic arm will take pictures of Ingenuity throughout the sequence to confirm everything looks good.
On the day before Perseverance releases the helicopter, the Ingenuity team at JPL will fully charge the rotorcraft’s six battery cells using electricity from the rover’s plutonium power source. Then the rover will sever its connection to the helicopter to drop about 5 inches (13 centimeters) down to the Martian surface.
“Then there will the deposition of the helicopter on the surface, and then there will be that first exposure to sunlight where we have to charge the batteries by ourselves,” Balaram said. “We are no longer part of the Perseverance rover and connected safely and we are completely on our own, fully autonomous, waiting to receive commands.
Once Ingenuity is on the ground, the Perseverance begin driving away from the helicopter. Its destination will be an observation point at least 200 feet, or 60 meters, away from Ingenuity’s flight zone, which itself is about the length of a football field. The flight zone includes an airfield, a 33-by-33-foot (10-by-10-meter) area where the helicopter will take off and land.
Ground teams selected the location for the airfield with the help of imagery from Perseverance’s cameras, which surveyed the landscape at its landing site at Jezero Crater over the last month. The region chosen for the test flights is flat, with few rocks or obstacles that could pose a threat to the helicopter.
There will be a bit of drama after the rover releases the helicopter onto the surface.
Ingenuity’s batteries can power the helicopter and keep its internal electronics warm for about 25 hours before they need recharged. The rover will be shading Ingenuity’s solar panels after it releases the aircraft, so it will have to drive away within a day to allow sunlight to illuminate the helicopter, according to Farah Alibay, an engineer who oversees Perseverance’s integration with the Ingenuity helicopter.
(https://mk0spaceflightnoa02a.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/jpegPIA24495.width-1320.jpg)
NASA’s Perseverance rover captured this view of the Ingenuity helicopter’s “airfield” in Jezero Crater. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
“We will go through a number of days of commissioning, approximately a week, where we test out sensors, we test out solar mechanisms, we test the motors to make sure they spin right, and we will be very methodical and even driven as this engineering experiment unfolds,” Balaram said. “And then we will be at a point where we will undertake our first flight and then we will progressively undertake more aggressive flights once we understand and analyze all the behaviors on that first flight.”
Ingenuity’s counter-rotating rotors will spin up to 2,537 rpm — more than 40 times per second — while the helicopter remains on the ground, a final test before engineers commit the aircraft to flight.
“Our current best estimate of when the (first) flight could happen is no earlier than about April 8, but things are fluid,” Balaram said. “We are very event and experiment driven, so that could be changed by a few days in either direction, but the best guess that we have right now is about April 8.”
Mars is currently about 159 million miles, or 259 million kilometers, from Earth. It takes communications signals about 14 minutes make a one-way trip between the planets, eliminating any chance for ground teams to fly Ingenuity in real-time.
Instead, engineers will uplink commands for each of the helicopter’s flights, and Ingenuity will autonomously take off and land, using a vision-based navigation system to help guide its flights.
Engineers tested the helicopter in a low-pressure chamber at JPL, which simulates the atmospheric conditions on Mars.
Before committing the helicopter to flight, engineers will assess wind conditions and other weather parameters, such as atmospheric density, to maximize the chances of success. Controllers at JPL can adjust the rotor speed to best match the atmospheric conditions on the day of each flight.
“I think the biggest challenge will be that we are are flying in the atmosphere of Mars, which has its own dynamics, its own winds, with gusts and so forth,” Balaram said. “These are things which we tested with wind tunnels in our chamber. We have some confidence that everything will be good, but there’s nothing that beats actually being in the real environment of Mars to see how well the … aerodynamics actually work out.”
Balaram said there are also challenges related to surviving the cold Martian nights, when temperatures dip well below zero.
“It’s difficult to keep a small system warm through the night. So just to see how well that thermal system protects us through the night, how well does the solar panel work?” he said. “There are a number of engineering aspects before you even get to the flight. But when it comes to the actual flying, it’s really the winds and the dynamics of how that all interacts with the helicopter that will be most interesting for us to learn.”
Assuming the first flight goes well, Ingenuity could fly up to four more times, reaching a higher altitude of about 16 feet (5 meters) and traversing downrange along the pre-selected flight zone, before returning to its “helipad” for landing.
The 16-foot limit for Ingenuity’s flights is largely driven by the performance limitations of a laser rangefinder on-board that measures the helicopter’s distance to the ground, according to Grip.
“We’re focusing on demonstrating basic capability to hover and then traversing and going longer distances, where we go down the flight zone and back again,” Grip said. “And then if we get past those, we will assess did we meet all tho objectives during those flights, do we want to back and retry some of those things, or if everything goes really well, then we might try to stretch our capabilities.”
NASA has set aside just one month for Ingenuity’s test flights because the $2.4 billion Perseverance mission needs to get moving in pursuit of its own higher-priority scientific objectives. The rover is designed to collect rock samples for return to Earth by a future mission set to arrive at Mars in the late 2020s.
Scientists back on Earth will analyze the specimens and search for signs of ancient Martian life.
“Ingenuity is a limited time project,” Glaze said. “It will have 31 Earth days to attempt to be the first helicopter to fly on another planet. It isn’t intended to collect science, but because its mission is so focused, it is, at its core, innovative.”
NASA’s first Mars rover, named Sojourner, landed on the Red Planet in 1997 and proved the usefulness of surface mobility in exploring other worlds.
“Sojourner redefined what we thought was possible on the surface of Mars and completely transformed our approach to how we explore it,” Glaze said. “That small rover enabled all the missions to follow, and now Perseverance — the size of a small car — is able to carry other technology demonstrations, like Ingenuity, which will further expand our horizons.”
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.
“If we can scout and scientifically survey Mars from the air with a thin atmosphere, we can certainly do the same in a number of other destinations across the solar system, like Titan or Venus,” Braun said.
Airborne drones could survey regions on other planets not reachable by rovers driving on the ground.
“The future of powered flight in space exploration is solid and strong,” Braun said.
Source: https://spaceflightnow.com/2021/03/26/nasa-primed-for-historic-flight-of-experimental-mars-helicopter/
-
Mars rover deploys Ingenuity helicopter for historic flight
April 4, 2021 Stephen Clark [SFN]
(https://mk0spaceflightnoa02a.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/EyF2yf7WUAMSUdR.jpeg)
This camera view from the Perseverance rover shows the Ingenuity helicopter on the surface of Mars. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
NASA’s Perseverance rover released the Ingenuity helicopter onto the surface of Mars Saturday, leaving behind the experimental flying drone to survive on its own power until attempting a historic hop in the Red Planet’s thin carbon dioxide atmosphere.
The milestone kicks off a week of checkouts and testing before NASA commits to the $80 million Ingenuity helicopter’s first test flight, currently targeted for April 11.
NASA officials confirmed rover deposited the 4-pound (1.8-kilogram) helicopter on the ground Saturday. Imagery from one of the Perseverance rover’s hazar cameras showed Ingenuity standing upright on the planet’s surface.
The six-wheeled rover needed to drive away from the helicopter within 25 hours to ensure sunlight could begin charging the rotorcraft’s six lithium-ion batteries. Based on the hazard camera view from Perseverance, the Ingenuity helicopter appeared to be basking in sunlight after its deployment, with the afternoon sun casting a shadow on Mars’s rust-colored soil.
Twitter (https://twitter.com/NASAJPL/status/1378513754241961985)
The Ingenuity helicopter has been attached to the belly of the Perseverance rover for nearly one year. Technicians working inside a clean room at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center attached the rotorcraft to the rover April 6, 2020, a few months before the mission blasted off from Cape Canaveral aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket July 30.
A debris shield protected the helicopter during the rover’s landing on Mars on Feb. 18. Last month, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, uplinked commands to jettison the debris shield in preparation for the helicopter’s release.
Over the last week, ground teams stepped through a choreographed sequence of commands to first release a lock that held the helicopter firmly against the belly of the rover in a horizontal position. Then the helicopter rotated to a roughly 45-degree angle, and two of the craft’s four carbon composite legs extended.
Last week, the helicopter moved into a vertical orientation and the other two landing legs unfurled. That left just a tiny bolt and some electrical connectors linking the rover with the helicopter.
Those electrical wires allowed the rover’s nuclear battery to charge up the helicopter’s batteries to full capacity.
“That’s a good thing, because Ingenuity has to run its own heater from its own battery after the drop. No more free power from the rover!” wrote Bob Balaram, the helicopter’s chief engineer at JPL, in a blog post Friday.
Before the helicopter dropped off the belly of the rover, Perseverance powered a heater that kept the rotorcraft’s internal electronics at about 45 degrees Fahrenheit (7 degrees Celsius). Temperatures at Perseverance landing site inside Jezero Crater can drop as low as minus 130 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 90 degrees Celsius).
(https://mk0spaceflightnoa02a.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/m2020art.jpg)
Artist’s illustration of NASA’s Perseverance rover and Ingenuity Mars Helicopter. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Ingenuity is now on its own, and it doesn’t have the same robust plutonium power source as Perseverance. The helicopter’s tiny batteries will power a heater set to keep the craft’s internal electronics at about 5 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 15 degrees Celsius), according to Balaram.
“Then it’s off to survive the first night on its own!” Balaram wrote. “The Ingenuity team will be anxiously waiting to hear from the helicopter the next day. Did it make it through the night? Is the solar panel working as expected?
“The team will check the temperatures and the battery recharge performance over the next couple of days,” Balaram wrote. “If it all looks good, then it’s onto the next steps: unlocking the rotor blades, and testing out all the motors and sensors.”
NASA said Wednesday that Ingenuity’s first flight is now targeted for no earlier than April 11, with data confirming the outcome of the hop expected back on Earth the next day.
Perseverance will head for an observation location at least 200 feet, or 60 meters, away from Ingenuity’s flight zone, which itself is about the length of a football field. The flight zone includes an airfield, a 33-by-33-foot (10-by-10-meter) area where the helicopter will take off and land.
Engineers used imagery from Perseverance’s cameras to select the site for the airfield, an area free of large boulders and steep slopes.
The Ingenuity helicopter is a technology demonstration, and the autonomous test flights will come with risks. NASA wants to ensure the Perseverance rover is a safe distance away from the rotorcraft when it takes off.
Ingenuity’s counter-rotating carbon-fiber rotor blades span about 4 feet (1.2 meters) tip-to-tip, and the blades will spin up to 2,537 rpm — more than 40 times per second — while the helicopter remains on the ground, a final test before engineers commit the aircraft to flight.
Engineers plan up to five test flights, starting with an ascent to an altitude of about 10 feet (3 meters), where the craft will hover for about 30 seconds before making a turn and landing back where it took off. Further test flights will reach a maximum altitude of about 16 feet (5 meters), and introduce forward motion to carry the helicopter down the flight zone and back to its takeoff location.
Using a wireless transmitter and receiver, the Perseverance rover will relay commands and data between ground controllers on Earth and the Ingenuity helicopter.
NASA has set aside one month for the Ingenuity helicopter’s demonstration flights, and that clock started when Perseverance released the rotorcraft onto the surface of Mars. The airborne drone will attempt to fly in an atmosphere just 1% the thickness of Earth’s. To do that, the helicopter’s rotors will spin five-to-ten times faster than a typical helicopter flying in Earth’s atmosphere.
Ingenuity does not carry any scientific instruments. It has black-and-white and color cameras to assist in autonomous navigation and gather aerial imagery of the Perseverance rover’s landing site at Jezero Crater, which harbored a lake of liquid water more than 3 billion years ago.
The helicopter will be operating on its own on each of its flights. The one-way travel time for radio signals between Earth and Mars is currently more than 14 minutes.
If the experiment works, Ingenuity could pave the way for future aerial explorers to fly around other planets. NASA is already developing a rotorcraft to fly around Saturn’s moon Titan, which has an atmosphere denser than Earth’s.
After the 31-day helicopter test campaign, the Perseverance rover will continue on in pursuit of its primary goal to identify, collect, and seal rock samples for return to Earth by a future mission.
Source: https://spaceflightnow.com/2021/04/04/mars-rover-deploys-ingenuity-helicopter-for-historic-flight/
-
NASA reschedules Ingenuity first flight
by Jeff Foust — April 18, 2021 [SN]
(https://spacenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/ingenuity-onsurface-879x485.jpg)
Ingenuity will attempt its first powered flight on Mars early April 19 after engineers developed a workaround for a timer issue that delayed the flight a week ago. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
WASHINGTON — NASA now plans to attempt a first flight of the Mars helicopter Ingenuity early April 19 after finding a workaround to a software problem that delayed the flight earlier this month.
Source: https://spacenews.com/nasa-reschedules-ingenuity-first-flight/
-
NASA schedules first Mars helicopter test flight for Monday
April 18, 2021 Stephen Clark [SFN]
After some long-distance troubleshooting, NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter will attempt the first flight of its kind on another world Monday in a demonstration that could open the door to a new era of interplanetary aerial scouts.
Source: https://spaceflightnow.com/2021/04/18/nasa-schedules-first-mars-helicopter-test-flight-for-monday/
-
Ingenuity performs first flight on Mars
by Jeff Foust — April 19, 2021 [SN]
(https://spacenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/ingenuity-firstflight-879x485.jpg)
An image taken by NASA's Ingenuity Mars helicopter during its first flight April 19, looking down at the surface and its shadow. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
WASHINGTON — NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter successfully performed the first powered flight on another planet April 19, briefing hovering above the surface of Mars.
The 1.8-kilogram helicopter performed the flight at 3:34 a.m. Eastern, but data from the flight, relayed through the Perseverance rover and another Mars orbiter, arrived at Earth a little more than three hours later.
Source: https://spacenews.com/ingenuity-performs-first-flight-on-mars/
-
After successful first flight, NASA wants to push Mars helicopter to its limits
April 19, 2021 Stephen Clark [SFN]
Source: https://spaceflightnow.com/2021/04/19/after-successful-first-flight-nasa-wants-to-push-mars-helicopter-to-its-limits/
-
NASA celebrates first historic helicopter flight on Mars
April 19, 2021 Stephen Clark [SFN]
(https://mk0spaceflightnoa02a.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/ingenuityfight1.jpg)
A navigation camera on NASA’s Perseverance rover captured this view of the Ingenuity helicopter’s historic flight Monday. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
An automated mini-helicopter driven by two fast-spinning, counter-rotating rotors took off from the surface of Mars, hovered for 30 seconds, then successfully landed Monday to complete the historic first powered flight of an aircraft on another planet.
Source: https://spaceflightnow.com/2021/04/19/nasa-celebrates-first-historic-helicopter-flight-on-mars/
-
Ingenuity success opens door for future Mars helicopter missions
by Jeff Foust — April 20, 2021 [SN]
WASHINGTON — The successful flight of NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter on Mars paves the way for its use on future missions, agency officials said, but exactly when and how remain to be determined.
Source: https://spacenews.com/ingenuity-success-opens-door-for-future-mars-helicopter-missions/
-
Ingenuity makes second flight on Mars
by Jeff Foust — April 22, 2021 [SN]
(https://spacenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/ingenuity-flight2-879x485.jpg)
An image of the Ingenuity Mars helicopter in flight April 22, seen by the Mastcam-Z camera on the nearby Perseverance rover. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS
ORLANDO — NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter successfully made its second flight on Mars April 22, expanding its flight envelope as the project considers more ambitious tests in the coming days.
Source: https://spacenews.com/ingenuity-makes-second-flight-on-mars/
-
In another first, NASA’s Perseverance rover generates oxygen on Mars
April 22, 2021 Stephen Clark [SFN]
(https://mk0spaceflightnoa02a.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/perserverance_nameplates.jpg)
This view from the Perseverance rover’s navigation cameras shows the “Mars 2020” and “Perseverance” name plates on the vehicle’s robotic arm. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
In another first, an instrument inside NASA’s Perseverance rover has made oxygen out of carbon dioxide sucked in from the atmosphere of Mars, officials said Wednesday. The technology could help future astronauts “live off the land” by generating their own rocket fuel and breathing air.
Source: https://spaceflightnow.com/2021/04/22/in-another-first-nasas-perseverance-rover-generates-oxygen-on-mars/
-
NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter aces first longer-range flight on Mars
April 25, 2021 Stephen Clark [SFN]
NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter flew farther and faster Sunday than the rotorcraft’s first two test flights in the Martian atmosphere, traveling the length of a football field while exceeding distances and speeds achieved during testing on Earth, officials said.
Source: https://spaceflightnow.com/2021/04/25/nasas-ingenuity-helicopter-aces-first-longer-range-flight-on-mars/
-
Ingenuity performs third Mars flight as final, most challenging tests await
by Jeff Foust — April 26, 2021
(https://spacenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/ingenuity-flight3-878x485.jpg)
The Perseverance rover captured this image of Ingenuity during its third flight on Mars April 25. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
WASHINGTON — NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter performed its third flight on Mars April 25, setting it up for its final, and most challenging, tests.
Ingenuity took off from the Martian surface at 4:31 a.m. Eastern, going up to an altitude of five meters. It then flew 50 meters downrange and back before touching down 80 seconds after takeoff, according to data that arrived on Earth about six hours after the flight. The helicopter reached a top speed of two meters per second during the flight.
Source: https://spacenews.com/ingenuity-performs-third-mars-flight-as-final-most-challenging-tests-await/
-
Ingenuity shifts from technology to operations demo after successful fourth flight
by Jeff Foust — April 30, 2021 [SN]
(https://spacenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/ingenuity-4thflight-879x485.jpg)
A hazard camera on the Perseverance Mars rover captured an image of the Ingenuity helicopter during its fourth flight April 30. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
WASHINGTON — With four flights now complete, NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter will transition from being strictly a technology demonstration to a test of its ability to work in cooperation with the Perseverance rover.
Source: https://spacenews.com/ingenuity-shifts-from-technology-to-operations-demo-after-successful-fourth-flight/
-
Mars helicopter ‘muscles through’ navigation glitch on sixth flight
May 27, 2021 Stephen Clark [SFN]
(https://mk0spaceflightnoa02a.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/ingenuity3.jpg)
One of the cameras on the Perseverance rover’s Mastcam-Z instrument took this picture of the Ingenuity helicopter April 9. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU
NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter safely landed after wobbling, suffering power spikes, and enduring velocity fluctuations on its sixth flight at Mars, officials said Wednesday.
The helicopter took off May 22 on its sixth automated flight and completed the first leg of a planned 705-foot (215-meter) excursion without a hitch. But Ingenuity started tilting back and forth in an oscillating pattern, encountering roll and pitch excursions of more than 20 degrees, registering large control inputs, and suffered spikes in power consumption, according to Håvard Grip, the helicopter’s chief pilot at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
Source: https://spaceflightnow.com/2021/05/27/mars-helicopter-muscles-through-navigation-glitch-on-sixth-flight/
-
NASA's Mars helicopter Ingenuity aces post-glitch seventh flight
"No anomalies in flight 7, Ingenuity is healthy!" [cnet]
Amanda Kooser June 9, 2021 6:59 a.m. PT
(https://www.cnet.com/a/img/ragv-y8oHFv2MrJWCEQhr_-1tiU=/2021/06/09/61929915-aea0-48c7-8e61-fb24aff45f3f/ingenuityflight7.jpg)
Ingenuity snapped this view of its shadow with its navigation camera during its seventh flight. NASA/JPL-Caltech
There were some tense moments with NASA's Ingenuity Mars helicopter last month when it went wonky during its sixth flight. But the plucky chopper survived the in-flight anomaly, set itself down safely, and then proved its mettle by completing a seventh flight.
On Friday, NASA had announced it was aiming for no earlier than Sunday, June 6, for the next leg in Ingenuity's epic journey. It takes time to get data and updates from Mars, so we had to wait for the report. On Tuesday, NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab tweeted that flight seven was a success.
While the tech glitch on the earlier flight was concerning, the Perseverance rover was able to confirm that Ingenuity landed itself in a safe spot. The most recent flight lasted 62.8 seconds and took the rotorcraft to a new location 350 feet (106 meters) away.
Source: https://www.cnet.com/news/nasa-mars-helicopter-ingenuity-aces-post-glitch-seventh-flight/#:~:text=NASA%27s%20Mars%20helicopter,a.m.%20PT
-
NASA studying larger Mars helicopters
by Jeff Foust — June 24, 2021 [SN]
(https://spacenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/marsscicopter-879x485.jpg)
A concept called Mars Science Helicopter, shown in a video at a recent Mars exploration meeting, would fly a 30-kilogram hexacopter capable of traveling up to 10 kilometers per flight and carry five kilograms of science payloads. Credit: NASA JPL/NASA Ames/AeroVironment
WASHINGTON — With the Ingenuity helicopter continuing to demonstrate its abilities on Mars, NASA engineers are examining concepts for larger, more capable rotorcraft that could be flown on future missions.
Ingenuity performed its eighth flight on Mars June 21, traveling 160 meters and landing at a new site 133.5 meters from the Perseverance rover. The flight, which lasted 77.4 seconds, was the third since Ingenuity shifted from its original five-flight technology demonstration mission, proving it could fly in the thin Martian atmosphere, to serving as an operations demonstration working in conjunction with Perseverance.
Those flights are scheduled to continue for at least a few more months.
Source: https://spacenews.com/nasa-studying-larger-mars-helicopters/
-
Mars rover gearing up for first sample collection work
July 21, 2021 William Harwood STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION [SFN]
(https://mk0spaceflightnoa02a.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/1-PIA24746_MAIN_FINAL_Sol0136P_zcam08143_Z048_R0N.jpg)
A light-colored “paver stone” like the ones seen in this mosaic will be the likely target for first sampling by the Perseverance rover. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS
Five months after landing on Mars, NASA’s Perseverance rover is gearing up to collect its first core sample next month, mission managers said Wednesday, drilling out a lipstick-size bit of rock from the floor of an ancient lakebed where the remnants of past microbial life might be preserved.
Source: https://spaceflightnow.com/2021/07/21/mars-rover-gearing-up-for-first-sample-collection-work/
-
Perseverance collects first Mars samples
by Jeff Foust — September 13, 2021 [SN]
(https://spacenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/perseverance-rochette-879x485.jpg)
An image from NASA's Perseverance Mars rover shows where the rover drilled into a rock called Rochette and collected two samples. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
WASHINGTON — NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has collected and stored the first samples of Martian rock for later return to Earth, but exactly when those samples will arrive on Earth remains uncertain.
At a Sept. 10 news briefing, NASA officials and project scientists hailed the collection of two samples from a rock dubbed “Rochette” as a major step forward in the long-term Mars sample return effort that will conclude no earlier than a decade from now with those samples returned to Earth.
Source: https://spacenews.com/perseverance-collects-first-mars-samples/
-
Ingenuity still “as good as new” after nearly a year on Mars
by Jeff Foust — March 12, 2022 [SN]
(https://spacenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/ingenuity-after1stflight-879x485.jpg)
Ingenuity, originally developed as a tech demo with a goal of up to five flights, has now flown 21 times and serves as a scout for the Perseverance rover. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS
WASHINGTON — After nearly a year of operations, NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter is still “as good as new” as it serves as a scout for the Perseverance rover.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced March 11 that Ingenuity completed its 21st flight on the planet, traveling 370 meters during the 129-second flight. The helicopter has now traveled more than 4.6 kilometers since its first flight in April 2021.
Source: https://spacenews.com/ingenuity-still-as-good-as-new-after-nearly-a-year-on-mars/
NASA’s Perseverance rover spots its own parachute on Mars
April 13, 2022 Stephen Clark [SFN]
(https://spaceflightnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/ZR0_0403_0702714612_409EBY_N0200000ZCAM05102_1100LMJ01_1200.jpg)
The Mastcam-Z instrument on the Perseverance rover captured this view April 8 of the craft’s parachute and back shell on the surface of Mars. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU
More than a year after arriving on Mars, NASA’s Perseverance rover has spotted its parachute and part of its aeroshell sitting on the surface of the Red Planet as the robot heads for a dried-up river delta where liquid water flowed billions of years ago.
The rover’s long-range zoom camera captured an image of the orange-and-white parachute lying on the rust-colored Martian soil. The craft’s back shell, which helped shield Perseverance during its plunge into the Martian atmosphere last year, is visible near the parachute.
The rover jettisoned the parachute and back shell about a minute before landing in Jezero Crater, a basin once covered in liquid water fed by a river flowing down from nearby highlands. The rover then slowed for landing with the help of a rocket pack, which lowered Perseverance to the surface of Mars on cables and bridles in a technologically complex method NASA calls the “sky crane.”
https://spaceflightnow.com/2022/04/13/nasas-perseverance-rover-spots-its-own-parachute-on-mars/
Ingenuity’s record-breaking year transforms Mars exploration
April 19, 2022 Clive Simpson [SN]
(https://spaceflightnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/ingenuity-mastcamz-1.jpg)
Credit: NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter imaged by the zoomable Mastcam-Z camera on the Perseverance rover. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU
The first-ever powered flights over another planet have proved a resounding success for NASA’s JPL team, which is celebrating Ingenuity’s 12-month anniversary of its first helicopter hop on Mars Tuesday.
Some 25 flights later, the Ingenuity helicopter — which hitched a ride to Mars on NASA’s Perseverance rover — is going from strength to strength.
Speaking exclusively to Spaceflight Now, Jaakko Karras, Ingenuity chief engineer at NASA’s JPL, Pasadena, California, said: “It’s an exciting milestone and Ingenuity really has exceeded all our best expectations.
https://spaceflightnow.com/2022/04/19/ingenuitys-record-breaking-year-transforms-mars-exploration/
Perseverance rover records solar eclipse on Mars
May 4, 2022 Stephen Clark [SFN]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKK7vS2CHC8
The zoomable camera on NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars recently captured a dramatic view of Phobos, the largest of the Red Planet’s two potato-shaped moons, crossing the face of the sun in a solar eclipse lasting a little more than 40 seconds.
The Mastcam-Z instrument on the Perseverance rover recorded the solar eclipse April 2, according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Phobos measures 17 miles (27 kilometers) across on its longest axis, and orbits about 3,700 miles (6,000 kilometers) from the Martian surface, completing three laps around the planet per day.
https://spaceflightnow.com/2022/05/04/perseverance-rover-records-solar-eclipse-on-mars/
Ingenuity “hunkering down” during Martian dust storms and winter
by Jeff Foust — May 30, 2022 [SN]
(https://spacenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/ingenuity-onsurface-879x485.jpg)
NASA's Ingenuity Mars helicopter is waiting out dust storms and a winter season that reduce the amount of power its solar panels generate and thus its ability to fly. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
WASHINGTON — Dust storms and changing seasons will limit the ability of NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter to fly for the next several months, a project engineer said May 27.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory released May 27 a video compiled from images taken by Ingenuity on a record-setting flight April 8. On that flight, the helicopter traveled 704 meters at a speed of 5.5 meters per second, the longest and fastest flight yet for the tiny helicopter.
https://spacenews.com/ingenuity-hunkering-down-during-martian-dust-storms-and-winter/
-
Ingenuity Mars helicopter mission ends after 72 flights (https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=1786.msg189172#msg189172)
Jeff Foust January 25, 2024
(https://i0.wp.com/spacenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/ingenuity-flight2.jpg?w=879&ssl=1)
An image of the Ingenuity Mars helicopter in flight April 22, 2021, seen by the Mastcam-Z camera on the nearby Perseverance rover. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS
WASHINGTON — NASA has declared the end of the mission for the Ingenuity Mars helicopter after 72 flights, exceeding even the most optimistic expectations.
NASA announced Jan. 25 that Ingenuity’s rotor sustained damage on its most recent flight Jan. 18. On that flight, contact between the helicopter and the Perseverance Mars rover was interrupted during the helicopter’s descent, but restored the following day. (...)
While Ingenuity is upright and in communication with controllers, images it returned showed damage to the tip of one of its rotor blades. “We’re investigating the possibility that the blade struck the ground,” Nelson said. NASA said in a statement it was still studying what caused the loss of communications and how the helicopter landed.
https://spacenews.com/ingenuity-mars-helicopter-mission-ends-after-72-flights/