Perseverance: NASA Celebrates Mars Rover's Second Birthday
For the past two years, Perseverance has roamed Mars' Jezero Crater looking for the best possible samples of Martian soil to return to Earth. Saturday, NASA officials celebrated to car-sized craft's second birthday on the Red Planet by looking forward to what it's set to accomplish in its third year in action.
"Anniversaries are a time of reflection and celebration, and the Perseverance team is doing a lot of both," Perseverance project scientist Ken Farley said in a NASA press release. "Perseverance has inspected and performed data collection on hundreds of intriguing geologic features, collected 15 rock cores, and created the first sample depot on another world. With the start of the next science campaign, known as 'Upper Fan,' on Feb. 15, we expect to be adding to that tally very soon."
To date, Perseverance has obtained 18 samples so far, with the rover recently sending a picture of 10 such tubes back to Earth.
"We deal with a lot of numbers," added Perseverance deputy project manager Steve Lee. "We collect them, evaluate them, compare them, and more times than we want to admit, bore our loved ones with them during a family dinner."
As it stands now, those samples are set to return to Earth at some point in 2031. A pick-up craft is supposed to launch towards Mars in 2026 before picking up the samples and returning back.
"The samples Perseverance has been collecting will provide a key chronology for the formation of Jezero Crater," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, said last year. "Each one is carefully considered for its scientific value."
"Right now, we take what we know about the age of impact craters on the Moon and extrapolate that to Mars," added Katie Stack Morgan, Perseverance's deputy project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. "Bringing back a sample from this heavily cratered surface in Jezero could provide a tie-point to calibrate the Mars crater dating system independently, instead of relying solely on the lunar one."
Perseverance has been accompanied by Ingenuity, a helicopter that has provided NASA with additional data. Though it was only intended to fly five times, Ingenuity has successfully completed 43 flights, allowing researchers to help plot a course for the Perseverance rover across the planet.
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