NASA introduces Mars Rover mission
With the launch date for NASA’s Mars 2020 Rover mission four years away and counting, a team of engineers and scientists unveiled Friday new instruments and technology that will help the vehicle analyze, test and sample the Martian surface.
Conducted on Facebook Live, the discussion centered around the mission’s main objective — to find signs of life and collect samples for a possible future return to Earth — and featured a fun look at some of the new science and technology anticipated to be aboard the still unnamed planetary rover.
NASA will launch the rover sometime in July or August 2020, with entry into Mars’ atmosphere expected to occur in February 2021, explained Allen Chen, the entry, descent and landing lead for the mission at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
To pinpoint a landing site within a region thought to be favorable for microbial life, the rover will be equipped with a range trigger that will allow it to specify when to open deceleration chutes. Cameras will record valuable information about descent and landing, while helping the rover avoid hazards and consult maps as it navigates toward the best spot.
“We’ll really see what it’s like to be there as we’re putting this rover down in 2021,” Chen said.
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The nuclear-powered vehicle will also be outfitted with lasers and drills designed to study rocks both near and far as well as on-board instruments given the fitting acronyms of SHERLOC, WATSON and PIXL, that will investigate the chemical, mineral, physical and organic characteristics of rocks and surface materials.
In the interest of gathering information that could aid future human missions to the Red Planet, sensors on the rover’s mast and deck will monitor weather conditions and dust in the immediate environment, while a ground-penetrating radar will assess geologic structures under the Martian surface. Additionally, the vehicle will test methods of producing oxygen from the surrounding atmosphere.
Some 35 or more core samples will be taken from the surface by a robotic arm and sealed, to be cached on Mars until they can be collected and returned to Earth for study, explained Matt Robinson, a sampling and caching team deputy manager at JPL.
“We’re taking the important first step scientists have wanted to take for a long time,” Robinson said Friday.
Kenneth Farley, a Caltech project scientist working on the mission, said the samples would be important to understanding how Mars transitioned 3.5 billion years ago from what’s understood to be a wet, warm planet to the dry desert landscape we see today.
Though the samples may one day build on knowledge gleaned by previous rover missions like Curiosity, which landed in 2012 and found evidence last September of liquid water on slopes across the planet’s surface, Farley said NASA has not yet determined how materials will make it back to Earth.
“The decision of whether to bring those back is up to the people of the future and the NASA of the future,” Farley said.
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Sara Cardine, sara.cardine@latimes.com
Twitter: @SaraCardine
