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Paris: NASA’s mobile robot “Perseverance” has successfully completed the first year of its long mission on Mars in search of data indicating the possibility of life on its surface, while scientists on Earth await what the rover will find, the most complex of the vehicles sent so far to Mars.
On February 18, 2021, the roving robot landed on the surface of the Red Planet following a seven-month spaceflight. The scientist held his breath as he watched his astonishing descent through the thin Martian atmosphere. Seven long minutes of ‘terror’, followed by an overwhelming sense of relief as the vehicle unleashed its wheels without incident at the site of an ancient lake, Jezero Crater.
This was followed by a three-month phase devoted to training or “taming” the seven tools carried by the chariot on unknown and potentially difficult conditions.
Pernel Bernardi
In a statement to Agence France-Presse, the engineer at the French National Institute for Scientific Research, Pernille Bernardi, responsible for the French-American tool “SuperCam”, which is the “eye” of the mobile robot, said, “The land of Mars is a land of many dangers, as it is full of gravels and large sand dunes. …”.
In its early days, the vehicle recorded sounds and sent them to the ground officials. “It was one of the great discoveries this year, as no one had ever heard of Mars before!” said Sylvester Morris, co-supervisor of SuperCam, an astrophysicist at the University of Toulouse.
Morris is considered an expert on Mars. For nine years, he has participated with the Americans in controlling the robot “Curiosity” from Earth, located thousands of kilometers away, in Gale Crater.
But the scientist never got tired of the red planet. “We are addicted to it,” he said. “We are discovering a new world just as the 15th century explorers did.”
Every day, Morris and his team work to organize and select the last sent by the robot. “Within 12 months, we collected a harvest of mineralogy, atmospheric and weather data, and tens of thousands of images,” he said. There is a symbolic significance for the coincidence of the date of the first anniversary of the “Perseference” mission with the millionth laser shot on Mars, a technique that aims to read the chemical composition of rocks, including 885,000 shots by “Curiosity” and 115 thousand by “Perseference.”
The most difficult thing is undoubtedly the control of the vehicle’s steering, which is shared in cooperation and alternately by the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the United States and the French Space Agency in Toulouse.
Every day, between 100 and 200 people work in the driving position. The scientist said, “A team may want to make the vehicle run, but the team in charge of the batteries may say ‘Wait, the batteries are very weak, we have to recharge them’, and the arm team may want more time to open it…”
Nicola Mangold
“There are frustrations, but things are often consensual … Americans have a real compromise culture,” said Nicolas Mangold, a researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research in charge of Supercam. He believed that the most difficult thing that happened last year was the impossibility of meeting in person because of the pandemic.
Perseverance has so far traveled four kilometers – including 500 meters last weekend, which is a record. There is no point in moving quickly. The goal of the mission is for the vehicle to collect, within six years, regarding forty well-selected samples, and another vehicle to transport these samples to Earth by 2030.
“You have to be patient,” said Arizona State University astronomy professor who is the principal investigator for the Mastcam-Z instrument.
The rover has collected seven samples to date – one of which failed because it was empty. “It’s a slow learning,” said the American astrophysicist, “but if you take into account all the difficulties, I’m the happiest scientist.”
He recalled the historic flight in the Martian atmosphere of the “Ingenuity” mini-helicopter, which is the reconnaissance tool for the robot, thus becoming the first motorized vehicle to fly over another planet, highlighting the importance of Perseverance’s proof last fall that the landing site was chosen well.
“We only had images taken from orbit, indicating the location of a lake. But we were very happy when we saw in the images taken from the surface of Mars, that it is indeed an ancient lake, fed by a delta-shaped river, such as the Mississippi or the Mekong,” he said.
The Delta is the next destination for Perseverance
After its first steps at the bottom of the crater, the delta will be Perseverance’s next destination, just two kilometers away, but the wagon will have to turn around to avoid a sand dune, reaching its destination by spring. “We can’t wait!” said Jim Bell. So.
The reason for this is that this environment, which was once fertile, and in which mineral elements accumulated, is the most suitable site for the possibility of the emergence of a microbial life form.
Nicola Mangold concluded that “the sediments from the rivers are the most likely to have recorded” of these primitive organisms, if it turns out that they were actually present.
