 | PHOTOGRAPH BY NASA/JPL-CALTECH
| | By Victoria Jaggard, SCIENCE Executive Editor
Perseverance is a pretty darn good name for NASA’s newest Mars rover. When the space agency opened up a naming contest in January, I initially championed Endurance, as an homage to the ship that ferried Sir Ernest Shackleton and his crew on a 1912 mission to Antarctica. But now, as the rover (illustrated above) gets loaded up for launch on Thursday amid a deadly pandemic and economic unrest, it’s clear this mission is already marked by perseverance.
Getting to Mars even under non-pandemic conditions is no easy feat. Since the 1960s, more than half of the spacecraft sent to the red planet have missed the mark, sometimes sailing right past it and sometimes ending in catastrophic crashes. Perseverance has a bit of a leg up, since it is modeled after the wildly successful Curiosity rover, including its elaborate “sky crane” landing system and its rugged chassis. Still, the world will be watching with bated breath in February, when the new rover is scheduled to arrive at Mars and make a harrowing descent into a 30-mile-wide basin known as Jezero Crater.
If the rover survives the journey, it will make scientific history. Perseverance was primarily designed with the capability of finding signs of ancient life that may have persisted for millions of years. Loads of evidence collected by past missions, from empty deltas to hydrated minerals, suggest that dry, dusty Mars was much warmer and wetter in its youth. But while previous robotic visitors were able to shore up the case that Mars was once habitable, none had the instruments dedicated to detecting traces of past inhabitants. This time, the rover’s scientific toolkit can examine rocks in fine enough detail to search for the kinds of fossil structures and chemical clues that would strongly hint at the presence of living things.
As it happens, Perseverance won’t be alone when it makes its Martian rendezvous. On July 20, the UAE orbiter called Hope blasted off for the red planet, marking the first Mars launch initiated by an Arab country. Three days later, China was hot on its heels with the launch of the Tianwen-1 mission, which will aim to get the first Chinese orbiter and rover safely to Marst. All three missions should arrive in February.
Given the pandemic, it’s tempting to think these missions are a waste of time and resources—why bother sending robots to Mars while the world burns? Practically speaking, it can be even more expensive to delay a mission than it can be to forge ahead: Mars-bound spacecraft have to launch during limited time windows, and waiting for the next one would cost NASA about half a billion dollars, according to Antonia Jaramillo with Florida Today.
Also, science is rarely an either-or proposition. Money and human ingenuity spent on launching rovers would not necessarily be routed to vaccines, nor should it. After all, finding signs that we are, in fact, not alone in the solar system would be a profound moment for humankind, and one I would argue is necessary for our collective sense of wonder and our own desire to persevere.
Do you get this daily? If not, sign up here or forward to a friend. | | | |
0 comments:
Post a Comment