NASA's Perseverance Rover Marks Its First Year Hunting for Past Life on Mars

It's been one year since a nuclear-powered, one-armed, six-wheeled robot punched through the Martian atmosphere at a blazing 12,000 miles per hour, and a supersonic parachute slowed it way down until a rocket-powered "jetpack" could fire its engines and then gently lower it onto the surface. NPR: NASA's Perseverance rover was too far away for engineers on Earth to control it in real time -- which meant that the spacecraft had to execute that daredevil maneuver all by itself. All that the robot's handlers on Earth could do was wait for confirmation that it had touched down safely. "It is a nail-biting experience," Rick Welch, Perseverance's deputy project manager. "There's no doubt about it." Dramatic as the Feb. 18, 2021 touchdown was, the milestones that the car-sized rover has hit in the year since then could one day prove far more momentous.

Perseverance is hunting for evidence of microbes that may have once lived on the red planet -- a first for a NASA robot. It begins a new chapter of Martian exploration: one that not only searches for ancient signs of microbial Martians, but that lays the groundwork to send samples of Mars rocks and dirt back to Earth. One of the mission's main objectives is to collect samples of rocks and dirt and stash them on the surface of Mars so that a future mission could pick them up and bring them back to Earth to study. The $2.7-billion rover is equipped with a suite of scientific instruments including a rock-blasting laser, cameras and spectrometers. But a robot geologist -- even one as advanced as Perseverance -- can only do so much. Scientists really hope to get pieces of the planet back to their labs.

Video of the last year and the coming year

[wooferhound]

Here is a NASA video on YouTube Celebrating the Rovers last Year and showing the plans for the next few years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

Settle down NPR

[fahrbot-bot]

... robot punched through the Martian atmosphere at a blazing 12,000 miles per hour, and a supersonic parachute slowed it way down until a rocket-powered "jetpack" could fire its engines and then gently lower it onto the surface.

NASA's Perseverance rover was too far away for engineers on Earth to control it in real time -- which meant that the spacecraft had to execute that daredevil maneuver all by itself.

Didn't the Curiosity rover [wikipedia.org] successfully use the same landing sequence 9 years earlier in 2012? I'm not saying it's not amazing, but NASA chose this (partially) due to the success of the Curiosity landing.

Re:

[Eunomion]

Yeah, but we got video of the landing sequence this time. People didn't appreciate just how audacious Curiosity's approach was, but Perseverance showed it happening.

Viking?

[Cpt_Kirks]

I thought the Viking landers were the first Mars probes to look for evidence of microbes there?

Re:

[Baconsmoke]

You are 100% correct. "In the LR experiment, both the Viking 1 and Viking 2 landers collected samples of Martian soil, injected them with a drop of dilute nutrient solution, and then monitored the air above the soil for signs of metabolic byproducts. ... In each case, the experiments tested positive for life." https://phys.org/news/2016-10-... [phys.org] It was a bit primitive and didn't get us what we were hoping for, but kudos to them for doing the experiments they did even way back then.

Re:Viking?

[Gavagai80]

Viking tested for present microbes. Perseverance is the first designed to look for evidence of microbes from billions of years ago.