Mars Exploration: NASA's Perseverance rover landed on Mars' Jezero Crater with 'Ingenuity helicopter'

An image from Perseverance. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

 

NASA's Perseverance rover just landed on Mars.  One of its main missions is to look for signs of life.

"There's no doubt that we can't sterilize astronauts like we sterilize robots right?  We can't kill all the bugs and so sort of choosing where we go with astronauts on the surface of Mars and protecting other sites on the surface of Mars for science exploration so we're not forward contaminating these sites is part of the strategy," said NASA Administrator Steve Jurczyk.

The rover endured 'seven minutes of terror' on its descent.  That's the time it takes to enter Mars' atmosphere and reach the planet's surface.

It landed on the Jezero Crater, the site of an ancient lake that existed 3.9 billion years ago.

Not long after, the first image came in to NASA.  Perseverance will search for microfossils in the rocks and soil. 

An illustration of NASA’s Perseverance rover landing safely on Mars. Credit: NASA and JPL-Caltech

There will also be an experimental helicopter flight.  The Mars helicopter, is known as Ingenuity.

"Everytime we execute a mission with new instruments we discover new things and things we never thought we would discover so that's always informs our future robotic missions both landers, rovers, and orbiters. 

This mission also has technology on it, one of the cool things is the ingenuity helicopter.  It's an experiment on this mission but if it's successful we can use it as an observation science observation platform by putting instruments on it and also use it as a scout for future rover missions and then just the entry set and landing capability.  It'll allow us to land more larger more ambitious robots on the surface of Mars," said NASA Administrator Steve Jurczyk.

Perseverance traveled 293 million miles since it launched July 30, 2020.  The project cost about $2.7 billion to build, launch, and operate the rover.