The Perseverance rover, the most complex exploration vehicle ever sent to Mars, successfully completed the first year of its long mission to search for traces of past life on the red planetkeeping the world’s scientists on edge.
On February 18, 2021, the NASA rover landed on the planet Mars following a seven-month trip. The world of researchers held its breath as it descended through the thin Martian atmosphere. Seven long minutes of “terror” ended in immense relief when the vehicle safely reached an ancient lake, Jezero Crater. This was followed three months of exploring a fairly hostile area.
“The Martian soil is a dangerous terrain, full of rocks and large dunes,” described Pernelle Bernardi, an engineer at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in charge of the Franco-American instrument SuperCam, the “eye” of Perseverance.
In its early days, was able to record sounds and transmit them to the inhabitants of the Earth. “It was one of the great discoveries of the year.No one had ever heard Mars speak before!” recalls Sylvestre Maurice, scientific co-director of SuperCam and an astrophysicist at the University of Toulouse.
Maurice is also in charge with American scientists of the robot Curiosity, which explores the red planet thousands of kilometers away, in the Gale crater. “We are drug addicts, we are discovering a new world, a bit like the explorers of the fifteenth century,” he says ironically.
Every day, he checks with his team the latest information detected by the vehicle. “In twelve months, we have collected a harvest of data on mineralogy, atmosphere and meteorologyand tens of thousands of images,” he says.
The date of the first anniversary of its mission also coincides with that of the millionth laser shot on Mars, a technology designed to read the chemical composition of rocks: some 885,000 shots made by Curiosity and 125,000 by Perseverance.
The hardest part is piloting the vehicle, shared alternately and jointly every two weeks between Cnes (the French space agency) in Toulouse and the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in the United States.
Every day, between 100 and 200 people run the apparatus. “One team will want to drive, the battery team will say ‘wait, we’re too weak, we need to recharge’ (…),” says the scientist. “There are frustrations, but most of the time it’s consensual… Americans have a real culture of compromise,” says Nicolas Mangold, the CNRS researcher in charge of SuperCam. According to him, the hardest thing this year was not being able to meet physically due to the pandemic.
So far, Perseverance has covered four kilometers, including a record 500 meters last weekend.
There’s no need to rush: the goal of the mission is to take some 40 well-chosen samples over six years. The goal is for another mission to bring them back to Earth in the 2030s. “You have to be patient, Perseverance is like a turtle, very smart,” says Jim Bell, a professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona, the principal investigator of the Mastcam-Z instrument.
The rover has already collected seven samples, one of which failed (it was empty). “It’s a slow learning curve, but given the constraints, I’m the happiest scientist,” says the American astrophysicist.
