Perseverance sends back first image from Mars

NASA’s newest Mars rover is called Perseverance, and it has already lived up to the name.

Watch a replay of the landing here, courtesy of NASA TV and The Associated Press:

Here is the first image the rover sent from the planet’s surface after it landed about 3:55 p.m. ET Thursday:

“Touchdown confirmed! Perseverance safely on the surface of Mars, ready to begin seeking signs of past life,” flight controller Swati Mohan announced to back-slapping, fist-bumping colleagues wearing masks against the coronavirus.

The landing marked the third visit to Mars in just over a week. Two spacecraft from the United Arab Emirates and China swung into orbit around Mars on successive days last week. All three missions lifted off in July to take advantage of the close alignment of Earth and Mars, journeying some 300 million miles in nearly seven months.

Perseverance, the biggest, most advanced rover ever sent by NASA, became the ninth spacecraft since the 1970s to successfully land on Mars, every one of them from the U.S.

The car-size, plutonium-powered vehicle arrived at Jezero Crater, hitting NASA’s smallest and trickiest target yet: a 5-by-4-mile strip on an ancient river delta full of pits, cliffs and fields of rock. Scientists believe that if life ever flourished on Mars, it would have happened 3 billion to 4 billion years ago, when water still flowed on the planet.

During the next two years, Percy, as it is nicknamed, will use its 7-foot arm to drill down and collect rock samples with possible signs of bygone microscopic life. Three to four dozen chalk-size samples will be sealed in tubes and set aside on Mars to be retrieved by a fetch rover and brought homeward by another rocket ship. The goal is to get them back to Earth as early as 2031.

Scientists hope to answer one of the central questions of theology, philosophy and space exploration.

“Are we alone in this sort of vast cosmic desert, just flying through space, or is life much more common? Does it just emerge whenever and wherever the conditions are ripe?” said deputy project scientist Ken Williford. “We’re really on the verge of being able to potentially answer these enormous questions.”

Earlier Thursday, ground controllers at the space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, settled in nervously for the descent of Perseverance to the surface of Mars, long a deathtrap for incoming spacecraft. It takes a nail-biting 11 ½ minutes for a signal that would confirm success to reach Earth.

At about 2:25 p.m. Thursday, NASA said Perseverance was about 9,000 miles from Mars and everything was well ahead of the landing.

Weighing in at just over a ton and loaded with the most sophisticated instruments ever sent to the red planet, the six-wheeled, $2.4 billion space robot has already survived twin hurdles: a global pandemic when it launched and a seven-month, 309 million-mile trip to Mars.

Looking for signs of life

Perseverance touched down in Jezero Crater. It will quickly begin searching for conclusive evidence that life once flourished on Mars.

“Every previous mission has seen in one way or another that Mars was once habitable,” said Katie Stack Morgan, a geologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and deputy project scientist of the overall mission known as Mars 2020. “But with Perseverance we are taking the next step: looking for signs of life in the ancient rock record.”

To do this, scientists on Earth will peer through Perseverance’s camera “eyes,” scouring Jezero for rocks that contain patterns, textures and the distribution of chemicals that can only be explained by biological activity.

The rover will mostly hunt for stromatolites, rock structures that look similar to those created by microbial mats on Earth billions of years ago. But it will seek out other indicators of past life as well, including ones that could be unique to Mars.

“Our search is firmly based on what we see in the early Earth rock record, but we will also open our minds to what signs of life might look like on another planet,” Stack Morgan said.

Collecting samples

Though Perseverance is tasked with finding evidence of past life on Mars, it does not have the capability to prove that life actually existed. Instead, the rover will use a powerful drill at the end of its hinged arm to bore into promising rocks and collect core samples, each about the size of a marker pen. Those samples will be sealed inside 43 metal tubes in the rover’s belly.

Perseverance will set aside samples it collects for retrieval by a fetch rover launching in 2026. Under an elaborate plan still being worked out by NASA and the European Space Agency, the geologic treasure would arrive on Earth in the early 2030s. Scientists contend it’s the only way to ascertain whether life flourished on a wet, watery Mars 3 billion to 4 billion years ago. NASA’s science mission chief, Thomas Zurbuchen, considers it “one of the hardest things ever done by humanity and certainly in space science.”

“To make the claim that you have found signs of life on another planet requires the full capability of the terrestrial science community,” said Matt Wallace, Perseverance deputy project manager at JPL. “We can take maybe 100 pounds of instruments with us on the rover. In a single laboratory on Earth you can have a ton of equipment.”

Making oxygen

Perseverance will also test new technologies that could be used to support eventual crewed missions to Mars. These include an instrument the size of a small microwave oven that’s designed to make oxygen from the abundant carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere.

The Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, or Moxie, relies on a process called electrolysis that uses an electrical charge to drive a chemical reaction.

»Check to see if you sent your name to Mars

Generating oxygen on Mars is a necessity because it would be impractical for a crew to bring it from Earth, said Asad Aboobaker, a systems engineer and member of the science team for Moxie at JPL.

If Moxie works as expected, it will generate 6 to 10 grams of oxygen an hour. That’s a small fraction of the 30 to 40 grams of oxygen per hour that NASA budgets for each astronaut aboard the International Space Station, but Aboobaker said the technology is fairly easy to scale up.

Even more important, an instrument like Moxie will likely be used to create the 30,000 kilograms of oxygen necessary to make the liquid propellant that would rocket future human explorers off Mars when they are ready to return to Earth.

“We know how to land hundreds of kilograms of stuff on Mars; we don’t know how to land 30,000 kilograms of stuff on Mars,” Aboobaker said.

Flying a helicopter

The Mars 2020 mission also includes a 4-pound helicopter nicknamed Ingenuity that could be the first vehicle to fly on Mars.

If it works, future iterations could be used to create higher-resolution maps of the Martian surface and explore areas not suitable for wheeled rovers.

Because the Martian atmosphere is so thin — about 1% the density of Earth’s atmosphere at its surface — scientists were not sure that flying on Mars was possible.

“From the beginning, there was a natural skepticism,” said Mimi Aung, an engineer and project manager for Ingenuity at JPL. “The question at first wasn’t how, but if.”

Aung and her team determined that it is possible to fly in the thin Martian air if you have strong blades that can spin incredibly fast.

So on Mars, Ingenuity’s blades will make 2,400 revolutions per minute. The next challenge was designing a vehicle that had all the necessary sensors, computers and heaters to function on Mars, yet was still light enough to become airborne. “Just to get where we are now is already a significant milestone,” Aung said.

After landing on Mars, Perseverance will place Ingenuity on the surface, then drive a safe distance away.

The helicopter will have 30 Martian days, or sols, to perform its experiments, including five planned test flights. The first flight will be modest, with the helicopter rising 10 feet, flying about 3 feet horizontally, then landing where it started. If everything goes well, subsequent flights will last longer, with the fifth one continuing for up to 90 seconds.

“We see this as a pathfinder that will pave the way for future missions,” Aung said. “It will be the basis for building much larger vehicles capable of much longer flights.”

Test-driving a new rover

The mission’s descent vehicle is equipped with terrain-relative navigation, a new system that will allow it to spot and avoid hazards when it’s time to land.

During the descent, Perseverance will take pictures of the Martian surface and compare them to images stored in its onboard computer. If it recognizes a dangerous spot, it can steer away.

This technology will allow the rover to land at NASA’s most high-risk site yet, an area about the size of Lake Tahoe that’s littered with potential threats including rocks, dunes and cliffs. Lake environments are a promising place to look for signs of past life, Stack Morgan said.

They likely held standing water for thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of years — long enough to give life plenty of opportunity to establish itself. And because they are relatively calm and peaceful environments, they allow sediments to settle gently on the bottom, creating well-preserved sequences of rock and, potentially, organic matter.

“Every lake we have on Earth is inhabited, just dripping with life,” she said. “We are going there with the expectation that if life was on Mars, it should be there.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.