NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover

[Beati Dogu]

NASA’s "Perseverance" Mars rover is due to launch today

Also known as the Mars 2020 mission. The Perseverance rover is very similar to the existing Curiosity rover, but with improvements to the wheels and a different suit of experiments onboard. It also carries the experimental Mars Helicopter "Ingenuity" (seen below, in front of the rover).




It'll launch on an Atlas V rocket from SLC-41 at Cape Canaveral.

Launch window: 12.50 pm - 2.50 pm UK time (7:50-9:50 a.m. EDT)

They're expected to reach Mars next February & land in the Jezero Crater, which is believed to be an ancient lake bed.


NASA Launch coverage:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIB3JbIIbPU

[Beati Dogu]

Yes, my name is on it too.

[Beati Dogu]

Well it's on its way now. Nice launch from ULA.



Photo: ULA



Photo: John Kraus

Edited by Beati Dogu on Thursday 30th July 20:37

[Beati Dogu]

He's a NASA preview video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4tdMR5HLtg

[Beati Dogu]

Blackpuddin said:

What happens to the Sky Crane once it's dropped the rover? Video I just watched on the Beeb suggests it flies off again, but where to?

It flies off and crashes.

Edit: Here's a satellite view from NASA/JPL-Caltech showing the area around the Curiosity rover soon after landing.

Edited by Beati Dogu on Thursday 18th February 17:22

[Beati Dogu]

Nice job. They’ll get better pictures once they take the protective lens caps off if I remember from the other mission.

[Beati Dogu]

Mars is visible right now, just above the moon. I gave it a wave.

[Beati Dogu]

This is where it landed:



The blue circle was the target area. Impressive.

This landing ellipse is only 4.8 miles long and 4.1 miles wide. Almost a circle, the accuracy is so good.

By comparison, the landing ellipse for the Viking missions was 174 miles long and 72 miles wide.

[Beati Dogu]

Here seen at JPL's Mars Yard testing area:



Vehicles from left to right:

Mars Explorer test rover (Like "Spirit" and "Opportunity", which both landed in 2004)

"Sojourner" (landed 1997)

Mars Exploration Rover Project's test vehicle (Like "Curiosity", which landed in 2012, and now "Perseverance")

[Beati Dogu]

I gave up on it too. Why bother to even have a press conference if the speaker is going to wear a muzzle the whole time. They'd have been far better doing it via a Zoom meeting frankly. That said, it's more the utterly retarded and inane questions from most so-called journalists that did it for me.


Anyway, nice picture of the rover taken from the Skycrane just before it was dropped off:



You can actually see the sand being blown away by the Skycrane's little rockets.

Edited by Beati Dogu on Friday 19th February 20:53

[Beati Dogu]

They'll be configuring the rover now & checking it's all working as expected. Some of it was folded for stowage or behind protective covers. They'll aso be switching over the software from flight mode to ground mode etc. I'm sure that once they've done with all that, they can free up the bandwidth for more photos and video. There's supposed to be some more on Monday I believe.

They'll be posting images here:

https://www.nasa.gov/perseverance/images


Its sister robot, Curiosity, has been trundling around on Mars for nearly 9 years now, so they are loads of photos available from that:

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/images/inde...

[Beati Dogu]

Now on the BBC website:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-561...

Incredible footage.

[Beati Dogu]

They've also published this panorama from the rover:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irbigpycU8w

[Beati Dogu]

The seemingly random fabric patching on the parachute encodes a 10 bit message:

"Dare mighty things" and also the coordinates on Earth for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

[Beati Dogu]

rider73 said:

i think if we ever develop technology to get to mars, we may as well go somewhere else like Europa or some other place, as Mars is actually pretty inhospitable for humans, IMHO far more safer to travel further in a "comfy and safe" space ship to get to a place thats easier on the humans to explore and even search for life than a barren dead planet of Mars...

I believe that's partially why Jeff Bezos is keener on huge, mile-wide space stations that rotate to create artificial gravity. Babylon 5 kinda vibes here. These are based on the writings of former Princeton University physicist Gerard K. O’Neill. Bezos was at Princeton when O’Neill was teaching there.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder


I'll probably end up being like the movie Elysium I suspect.

[Beati Dogu]

Eric Mc said:

Viking (1976)

Incidentally, that star shaped logo was to celebrate America’s bicentennial in 1976. It was designed by Bruce Blackburn, the same man who designed the NASA ‘worm’ logo. He died at the beginning of February, aged 82.

[Beati Dogu]

I've been having a play with the "Mission to Mars" Augmented Reality app on my iPad. Which is free.

amongst general information about Mars and the rovers, you can control augmented reality rovers like this one: a 1:6 scale Perseverance exploring the upper reaches of the bathroom floor. If you take it outside you can have it 1:1 scale.



You can also launch the Atlas V rocket and experience the "7 minutes of terror" of entry through the Mars atmosphere.

[Beati Dogu]

More still images from the surface:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqFn7_UA3Gw


Here's a look at the Mars helicopter:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhsZUZmJvaM

[Beati Dogu]

I bet. Be funny if they ran into a limestone outcrop.

i sure hope the helicopter is successful. It’ll be able to get some landscape photographs that would be impossible from the rover.

[Beati Dogu]

The rover had moved a short distance and taken a photo of where it landed.



You can see the two blasted areas either side, caused by the sky crane's rockets.