LATEST NEWS : NASA's PERSEVERANCE ROVER AND INGENUITY HELICOPTER LAUNCHED!

THE ROVER AND HELICOPTER TO THE RED PLANET

The mars rover named 'Perseverance' meaning continued effort to do or achieve something despite difficulties, failure, or opposition : the action or condition or an instance of preserving : steadfastness along with the Ingenuity helicopter which was named by an Indo - American high school student Vaneeza Rupani from Northport, Alabama has been launched yesterday. Ingenuity which means the quality of being cleverly inventive or resourceful; inventiveness, was originally a name for the Mars rover but NASA team realized the word as a terrific name for the helicopter, given how much creative thinking the team employed to get the mission off the ground. "The ingenuity and brilliance of people working hard to overcome the challenges of interplanetary travel are what allow us all to experience the wonders of space exploration," Rupani wrote. "Ingenuity is what allows people to accomplish amazing things." 

The rover which was named by a 13 year old student Alexander Mather from Virginia in an online competition for naming the rover and giving the reason for the name. 

Ingenuity is what is known as a technology demonstration – a project that seeks to test a new capability for the first time, with limited scope. Previous groundbreaking technology demonstrations include the Mars Pathfinder rover Sojourner and the tiny Mars Cube One (MarCO) CubeStats that flew by Mars in 2018. 

Ingenuity features four specially made carbon-fiber blades, arranged into two rotors that spin in opposite directions at around 2,400 rpm – many times faster than a passenger helicopter on Earth. It also has innovative solar cells, batteries, and other components. Ingenuity doesn't carry science instruments and is a separate experiment from the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover. 

Humanity's most sophisticated rover launched with the Ingenuity Mars helicopter at 7:50 a.m. EDT ( 4:50 a.m. PDT) Thursday on a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. 

The Perseverance rover's astrobiology mission is to seek out signs of past microscopic life on Mars, explore the diverse geology of its landing site, Jezero Crater, and demonstrate key technologies that will help us prepare for future robotic for future robotic and human exploration. 

"Jezero Crater is the perfect place to search for signs of ancient life,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate at the agency's headquarters in Washington. "Perseverance is going to make discoveries that cause us to rethink our questions about what Mars was like and how we understand it today. As our instruments investigate rocks along an ancient lake bottom and select samples to return to Earth, we may very well be reaching back in time to get the information scientists need to say that life has existed elsewhere in the universe." 

The Martian rock and dust perseverance Sample Catching System collects could answer fundamental questions about the potential for life to exist beyond Earth. Two future missions currently under consideration by NASA, in collaboration with ESA (European Space Agency), will work together to get the samples to an orbiter for return to Earth. When they arrive on Earth, the Mars samples will undergo in-depth analysis by scientists around the world using equipment far too large to send to the Red Planet. 

About seven cold, dark, unforgiving months of interplanetary space travel lay ahead for the mission – a fact never far from the mind of Mars 2020 project team. 

"There is still a lot of road between us and Mars," said John McNamee, Mars 2020 project manager at JPL. "About 290 million miles of them. But if there was ever a team that could make it happen, it is this one. We are going to Jezero Crater. We will see you there Feb. 18, 2021." 

Sources : nasa.gov, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Youtube Channel).

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