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A $2.7 billion NASA rover, Perseverance, is scheduled to launch from Florida’s Cape Canaveral at 7:50 a.m. Thursday atop an Atlas V rocket. If all goes well, the rover will land Feb. 18 on Mars on a mission to search for signs of ancient Martian life.
“Sitting atop that rocket there is one of the finest interplanetary payloads ever assembled, and the thousands of scientists and engineers behind them — they would have to be the finest team ever assembled,” Abigail Allwood, a geologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who is part of the science team, said as she and her colleagues awaited the launch. “This rover is going to kick some astrobiological butt.”
The rover is the successor to the still-operating Curiosity rover, which has made breakthrough discoveries, including finding complex organic molecules of the type that could be associated with living things. Perseverance is superficially similar to Curiosity but has a different suite of instruments that will allow it to inspect and take images of rock formations in far greater detail.
It has a drill for obtaining rock cores and soil samples, which the rover will stash in containers that in the future could be sent back to Earth for study in laboratories. The mission, officially known as Mars 2020, is the first leg of what is known as the Mars Sample Return campaign. Returning samples of Mars to Earth has been the highest priority of the planetary science community.
It’s possible there is life on Mars today, said Bruce Jakosky, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado and the lead scientist on a Mars orbiter that is studying the atmosphere of the planet. If so, that life would probably be deep underground in the porous rock where water is liquid.
“We’ve learned that Mars has seasons and an atmosphere that behaves in many ways similar to the Earth’s. Mars has geology that is very reminiscent of what we see on Earth — volcanoes, river channels. Mars has polar caps. And the climate has varied through times on many different time scales. Liquid water was abundant early in its history,” Jakosky said.
If all goes as planned, the rover will make a pinpoint landing in Jezero Crater, a site carefully picked by scientists for its plausible habitability in a distant era when Mars was warmer and wetter. The crater was once filled with water, and a river flowed into it, depositing sediments in a delta that is enticing to the scientists who will operate the rover remotely.
This mission will shine a light on “the potential biological history of Mars, and of course by doing so also create a better understanding and basis for future human missions,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s top science administrator.
As with all Mars missions, this one is fraught with promise and peril. Mars is notoriously difficult to explore with robotic probes, many of which have failed in some fashion upon reaching the planet.
“I find myself awake at night thinking about it,” Zurbuchen said.
The first order of business is the launch. The coronavirus pandemic has slowed many NASA missions, but this one has a deadline imposed by orbital physics: There’s a narrow window when the Earth and Mars are properly positioned. Perseverance must launch by Aug. 15. If NASA cannot proceed by then, the mission would be delayed by a couple of years until the planets are back in the right position.
