NASA launches Mars rover to look for signs of ancient life

Cape Canaveral (US), July 30

The greatest, most subtle Mars rover ever constructed — a car-size automobile bristling with cameras, microphones, drills and lasers — blasted off for the purple planet Thursday as a part of an bold, long-range undertaking to deliver the primary Martian rock samples again to Earth to be analysed for proof of historical life.

NASA’s Perseverance rode a mighty Atlas V rocket into a transparent morning sky on the earth’s third and last Mars launch of the summer season. China and the United Arab Emirates bought a head begin final week, however all three missions ought to attain their vacation spot in February after a journey of seven months and 480 million km.

The plutonium-powered, six-wheeled rover will drill down and gather tiny geological specimens that might be introduced house in about 2031 in a kind of interplanetary relay race involving a number of spacecraft and nations. The total price: greater than USD eight billion.

NASA’s science mission chief, Thomas Zurbuchen, pronounced the launch the beginning of “humanity’s first round trip to another planet.”

“Oh, I loved it, punching a hole in the sky, right? Getting off the cosmic shore of our Earth, wading out there in the cosmic ocean,” he mentioned. “Every time, it gets me.”

In addition to addressing the life-on-Mars query, the mission will yield classes that would pave the best way for the arrival of astronauts as early because the 2030s.

“There’s a reason we call the robot Perseverance. Because going to Mars is hard,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine mentioned simply earlier than liftoff. “It is always hard. It’s never been easy. In this case, it’s harder than ever before because we’re doing it in the midst of a pandemic.” 

The US, the one nation to soundly put a spacecraft on Mars, is in search of its ninth profitable touchdown on the planet, which has proved to be the Bermuda Triangle of area exploration, with greater than half of the world’s missions there burning up, crashing or in any other case ending in failure.

China is sending each a rover an orbiter.

The UAE, a newcomer to outer area, has an orbiter en route.

It’s the largest stampede to Mars in spacefaring historical past. The alternative to fly between Earth and Mars comes round solely as soon as each 26 months when the planets are on the identical aspect of the solar and about as shut as they will get.

Launch controllers wore masks and sat spaced aside on the Cape Canaveral management middle due to the coronavirus outbreak, which saved a whole lot of scientists and different staff members away from Perseverance’s liftoff.

“That was overwhelming. Overall, just ‘Wow!’” mentioned Alex Mather, the 13-year-old Virginia schoolboy who proposed the identify Perseverance in a NASA competitors and watched the launch in particular person together with his mother and father.

The launch went off on time at 7:50 a.m. regardless of a 4.2-magnitude earthquake 20 minutes earlier than liftoff that shook Southern California, the positioning of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is overseeing the rover mission.

If all goes effectively, the rover will descend to the Martian floor on February 18, 2021, in what NASA calls seven minutes of terror, through which the craft goes from 19,300 kmph to an entire cease, with no human intervention by any means. It is carrying 25 cameras and a pair of microphones that can allow Earthlings to vicariously tag alongside.

Perseverance will purpose for treacherous unexplored territory: Jezero Crater, riddled with boulders, cliffs, dunes and presumably rocks bearing indicators of microbes from what was as soon as a lake greater than three billion years in the past. The rover will retailer half-ounce (15-gram) rock samples in dozens of super-sterilized titanium tubes.

It additionally will launch a mini helicopter that can try the primary powered flight on one other planet, and test out different know-how to organize the best way for future astronauts. That consists of gear for extracting oxygen from Mars’ skinny carbon-dioxide environment.

The plan is for NASA and the European Space Agency to launch a dune buggy in 2026 to fetch the rock samples, together with a rocket ship that can put the specimens into orbit round Mars. Then one other spacecraft will seize the orbiting samples and convey them house.

Samples taken straight from Mars, not drawn from meteorites found on Earth, have lengthy been thought of “the Holy Grail of Mars science,” in accordance with NASA’s authentic and now-retired Mars czar, Scott Hubbard.

To definitively reply the profound query of whether or not life exists — or ever existed — past Earth, the samples have to be analyzed by one of the best electron microscopes and different devices, far too massive to suit on a spacecraft, he mentioned.

“I’ve wanted to know if there was life elsewhere in the universe since I was 9 years old. That was more than 60 years ago,” the 71-year-old Hubbard mentioned from his Northern California cabin.

“But just maybe, I’ll live to see the fingerprints of life come back from Mars in one of those rock samples.” Said Bridenstine: “There is nothing better than bringing samples back to Earth where we can put them in a lab and we can apply every element of technology against those samples to make determinations as to whether or not there was, at one time, life on the surface of Mars.”

Two different NASA landers are additionally working on Mars: 2018’s InSight and 2012’s Curiosity rover. Six different spacecraft are exploring the planet from orbit: three from the US, two from Europe and one from India. AP