NASA’s Perseverance rover has arrived on Mars. And from there, from the Red Planet, he sent his first images. “Hello world. My first look at the house I will live in forever,” reads the rover’s Twitter profile.
All standing to cheer, shouts of joy and a long moving applause from the NASA ‘control room’ have sanctioned the Perseverance touchdown. And the rover’s flight controllers “confirmed that the rover, with the Ingenuity Mars helicopter attached to its belly, landed safely” in Jezero Crater, a 45-kilometer-wide basin just north of the Martian equator, which about 3, 9 billion years ago it contained a lake.
With Perseverance, NASA returns to Mars tonight. “Seven minutes of terror” to discover traces of life
by Elena Dusi
Now a new space exploration page opens, with the fifth rover touching Mars. The Mars 2020 mission is destined to look for traces of past life and to collect the first samples of the Martian soil that in 2031 will be brought to Earth by a relay of missions in which Italy plays an important role. It is the most sophisticated probe that the US space agency has ever sent to the Red Planet that aims to carry out what the two previous Martian missions of the US agency, Curiosity and Opportunity, had suggested: billions of years ago Mars was a planet humid and with conditions potentially suitable for life.
“We will look for traces of life on Mars and the Perseverance rover will be able to search for these ‘traces’. My role will be to help in the interpretation of the data of the instruments on board the rover and to understand if there are the ‘signals’ of life” he explained the Neapolitan researcher Teresa Fornaro of INAF of Florence, one of the thirteen “Mars 2020 participating scientists” in the world. “We do not expect that life has evolved on Mars – he pointed out – but that there have been single-celled microorganisms it could be and we expect to find these traces”.
Persevernce’s journey began seven months ago. After the “seven minutes of terror”, the very delicate maneuver with which the carrier went from 20,000 to zero kilometers per hour, the parachute opened and the robot, the size of a car, began its adventure in search of clues to life. Costing three billion dollars, the mission will last two years and, in addition to trying to answer key questions about the history and evolution of Mars, it aims to set a milestone on the road to the goal of one day transporting humans there. .
In the past, only half of the attempted landings on Mars have succeeded and that of Perseverance was the riskiest ever attempted. “Perseverance” is equipped with a perforator, a two-meter robotic arm and seven different scientific detection instruments. He brings with him a small helicopter, called “Ingenuity” which will attempt the first controlled flight to Mars. If successful, even broader technological perspectives would open: a rover in one day can cover distances of several hundred meters that a helicopter would travel in seconds.
The samples collected by Perseverance will be stored in containers that will then be collected by a subsequent mission that NASA will recover in a series of subsequent missions that will be carried out together with the European Space Agency. A first rover will be sent to collect the different containers in a single container that will be sent into orbit around Mars and then be collected, later, by a space vector that will bring it back to Earth, with its precious contents, in 2031.
February was a hectic month for Mars. The Perseverance landing was preceded by the dispatch of the Emirati probe Hope, which successfully entered the Martian orbit last February 9, and by the Chinese orbital satellite Tianwen-1, whose landing will be attempted in the spring.