![]() The Perseverance design evolved from its predecessor, the Curiosity rover. Perseverance in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Pasadena, California Though initially hesitant to commit to an ambitious sample-caching capability (and subsequent follow-on missions), a NASA-convened science definition team for the Mars 2020 project released a report in July 2013 that the mission should "select and store a compelling suite of samples in a returnable cache." Īfter the success of the Curiosity rover and in response to the recommendations of the decadal survey, NASA announced its intent to launch a new Mars rover mission by 2020 at the American Geophysical Union conference in December 2012. The report stated that NASA should invest in a sample-caching rover as the first step in this effort, with the goal of keeping costs under US$2.5 billion. In 2011, the Planetary Science Decadal Survey, a report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine containing an influential set of recommendations made by the planetary science community, stated that the top priority of NASA's planetary exploration program in the decade between 20 should be to begin a NASA-ESA Mars Sample Return campaign, a four-mission project to cache, retrieve, launch, and safely return samples of the Martian surface to Earth. By the summer of 2012, a program that had been launching a mission to Mars every two years suddenly found itself with no missions approved after 2013. Budget cuts forced NASA to pull out of a planned collaboration with the European Space Agency which included a rover mission. History įirst image acquired moments after Perseverance 's landing, from front left Hazard Avoidance Camera, February 18, 2021ĭespite the high-profile success of the Curiosity rover landing in August 2012, NASA's Mars Exploration Program was in a state of uncertainty in the early 2010s. The second campaign will include several months of travel towards the "Three Forks" where Perseverance can access geologic locations at the base of the ancient delta of Neretva river, as well as ascend the delta by driving up a valley wall to the northwest. Butler landing site concludes the first science campaign. After that it will return to the Crater Floor Fractured Rough to collect the first core sample there. In the first science campaign Perseverance performs an arching drive southward from its landing site to the Séítah unit to perform a "toe dip" into the unit to collect remote-sensing measurements of geologic targets. Preparing for humans: test oxygen production from the Martian atmosphere.Caching samples: collect core rock and regolith ("soil") samples and store them within the rover and on the Martian surface (as a backup) for delivery to a future sample return rocket.Seeking biosignatures: seek signs of possible past microbial life in those habitable environments, particularly in specific rock types known to preserve signs over time. ![]()
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