The Perseverance Rover As I was watching the Perseverance Rover entering the atmosphere of Mars, I started to think how far we have come in exploring that planet. The record of successfully landing on Mars or even getting into orbit is not so great. In this area the United States is far ahead right now. The rover was lowered to the surface from tethers from the entry vehicle, which was even more amazing. The entire operation was extremely complicated with maybe hundreds of devices operating in a symphony with many different programs and yet it was so perfect. It spoke to the incredible talent on tap at NASA and other companies and organizations. The Perseverance rover was expensive, billions of dollars expensive, but can anyone really put a price on space exploration which has shown to pay us back in many new systems and devices? Perseverance is going to search for microbial life in the soil of Mars, but it is equipped with 6 hazard cameras, four in the front and two in the back which alert the machine of danger and to avoid certain directions. It has an enhanced engineering camera for driving which operators on earth can use. There is a big problem of course and that is the time it takes a signal to reach earth which make manual driving difficult. This camera is said to actually be several cameras in the same body. It can switch lenses. There is also a CacheCam as it is called. The camera looks down at the top of the sample cache. One of the incredible things Perseverance carries is a small helicopter which was designed to fly in the thin atmosphere of Mars. Perseverance is not very powerful and weights about 2260 pounds and is powered by an electric motor of about .15 horsepower, just enough to allow it to slowly travel on Mars. The Perseverance mission has cost 2.7 billion dollars. A few very strange photos of objects have been taken by other rovers so we never know what Perseverance might discover, or unfortunately what discovery might be held back. Can you imagine if Perseverance comes across a ruin? That would be earth shattering and something many of us who are interested in these things would be interested in. There is a problem however which to me does not seem to make much sense. It is the fact as Perseverance picks up samples, they are to be kept on Mars to at least 2031. We are going to wait until a joint NASA-European mission is ready to pick them up. Is this a political move to help out the European Space Agency? They have never landed anything on Mars so they will be relying on NASA technology I would imagine to develop a ship which can land on Mars, gather samples, and then return to earth. This will be a rather complicated mission. It is so far into the future it may never happen for different reasons. The helicopter carried by Perseverance has a name and it is Ingenuity, which seems very befitting to me. The atmosphere on Mars is so thin, one has to wonder how it will stay aloft. It has counter rotation rotors which are curved and look somewhat like the head of an ancient spear. Ingenuity will fly for short periods of time and then recharge. It is carried in the belly of Perseverance. Ingenuity weighs about 4 pounds. The engineers who built Ingenuity have said it is only a demonstration device built to see if we can really fly on Mars and if so, it will open the door to more aerial devices. I personally can’t wait to see if it works. As of the writing of this article it has not been tested on Mars yet. There is a NASA team called the helicopter team devoted to the device who will work with the rover team to launch the helicopter. It is said it will take about 10 days to get the helicopter out of Perseverance and ready to fly. The first flight will only be for 20 seconds and reach an altitude of 10 feet. It will have to charge from its solar batteries and keep warm during the frigid Mar’s nights. There is an interesting experiment on Perseverance, it is named MOXIE. This is short for Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment. It is going to generate oxygen from the Martian atmosphere which is basically carbon dioxide and thin. The idea is to find out if it works can it be scaled up for use by humans for habitation on Mars. Perseverance has landed in the Jezero Crater which is about 28 miles wide. It is thought a lake existed there about 3.5 billion years ago, along with a river delta. The clue was clay minerals were spotted on the crater floor and these are usually created by water. Perseverance was landed about 2,300 miles from where the Curiosity rover is, so the two will never meet. It takes a little over 3 minutes for light to travel from earth to Mars. A radio signal takes between 4.3 minutes to 21 minutes depending on how far Mars is from earth. This is an area which needs to be worked on perhaps in the quantum realm. It would be so much easier for scientists if they could operate in real time. On the flip side they were forced to develop many new technologies which could operate automatically which could be immensely useful in other areas in the future. I would like to talk a little about some of the strange looking objects which were seen in Mar’s photos from rovers in the past. One I remember was in the distance of a landscape and when it was magnified the object looked like a structure created in field stone and seemed to have a door. Another was a shiny object which was almost like a powerful spot light in the distance. There have been all sorts of objects which look like statues and construction materials. Objects which seem to be the skeletal remains of some sort of alien life have been seen in photos along with strange looking objects which seem to be skulls. Not human skulls but a little different. Since I first started seeing these things, I have felt there was far more to Mars than was being let on. It is great to look for microbial life, but have we ever really looked for intelligent life on the planet? If we have, I haven’t heard about it, but would love for it to happen.
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