At the start of 2021, the robotic population of Mars will increase by one.* The Perseverance rover launched early this morning from Cape Canaveral, and is scheduled to land at Jezero Crater next year on February 18th.
However, this mission is a little different than its predecessors. In addition to the same kind of physical exploration performed by other rovers, the newest citizen of the Red Planet is acting as a scout for future manned missions to Mars: testing technologies for extracting oxygen from the thin Martian atmosphere, identifying crucial resources such as subterranean water, trialing new landing procedures, and analyzing environmental conditions to allow future explorers to better predict dangerous weather.
Perseverance has also been tasked with searching for microbial life forms, in hopes of answering the ongoing question as to whether or not there is any sort of life on the surface of Mars, and whether or not there may have been life in the past.
Perseverance will be the first rover equipped to store drilled core samples for eventual collection. It's an important development - in spite of all the robotic exploration
and experimentation which has taken place on the surface of Mars, no
samples have been returned to Earth for further study and research, and this change in sampling strategy is part of the planning for astronauts to visit Mars.
To be completely accurate, I should have started by saying that the populations of Mars will increase by two. Perseverance isn't alone on its mission - it has a companion called Ingenuity, a lightweight autonomous*** solar-powered helicopter drone which will hopefully perform the first powered flight on Mars, thereby opening a completely new door for rapidly exploring the planet's surface.
The atmosphere of Mars is about 1% the density of Earth's, which makes powered flight a definite challenge, but on the plus side, the gravity is only 1/3 that of Earth. I'm confident that the science behind Ingenuity is sound, which means we're going to see some spectacular drone shots of Mars.
Building on the unexpected longevity of previous rovers like
Curiousity and
Opportunity, the mission duration for
Ingenuity and
Perseverance is a Martian year, or sol, which is about 687 Earth days. We wish you both a good trip and a safe landing - and hey, be careful up there,
it's dangerous.
- Sid
* Unfortunately, we don’t have enough AI in place yet** on Mars for the
kind of Darwinian self-replicating robotic evolution that pops up now
and then in science fiction. Recommended reading would be Code of the
Lifemaker by James P. Hogan, A Circus of Hells, by Poul Anderson, and innumerable short stories.
(To a lesser extent, Gregory Benford’s Galactic Center series fall under
this category as well.)
** Yet.
*** Autonomous is the key word here. The worst-case 40 minute round-trip lag in transmission time to Mars
makes direct control impractical. Imagine trying to drive to work if you
could only hit the brakes 20 minutes after you saw the light go red -
with another 20 minute delay before your car stopped. The good news is that there isn't anything else flying around for Ingenuity to hit - other than dust.
