Ingenuity, MOXIE and Perseverance: Inside the technology NASA's sending to Mars - Whitecourt Star

The new Mars rover boasts better instruments and a helicopter. 'For the first time, we’re going to have HD video of a spacecraft landing on another planet'

Take a look at Perseverance, the rover that NASA is sending to Mars on Thursday, and you may notice that it bears a striking similarity to Curiosity, which landed on the planet eight years ago and is still driving. But picture Curiosity as a 2012 Mercedes with a basic package of extras. In that scenario, Perseverance is a 2021 model with all the bells and whistles.

What does that upgrade get you? Here’s Matt Wallace, Deputy Project Manager, Mars 2020, whose work on Mars vehicles goes back to Sojourner, the Austin Mini of rovers that landed in 1997. “I’ve worked on five Mars missions and I can tell you this one’s pretty special,” he says.

Reached early this week, Wallace wasn’t particularly busy in the days leading up to the launch, with the rover already stowed inside the Atlas rocket that’s due to list off Thursday morning. “It’s a bit of a lull before the storm, or maybe the storm’s behind us,” he says. “We’re just watching the launch vehicle team go through their paces.”

He notes that Perseverance is about 126 kg heavier than Curiosity, topping out at 1,025 kg. That extra weight gets you some nice scientific add-ons as well as technology demonstrations.

A low-angle self-portrait of NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover vehicle at the site from which it reached down to drill into a rock target called “Buckskin” on lower Mount Sharp, Mars, released June 7, 2018. Handout by NASA/AFP/Getty Images

The former includes upgraded cameras, ground-penetrating radar, spectrometers, laser scanners and sensors to measure local temperature, wind velocity, pressure and humidity. Mars has weather, and while daytime highs in the summer can crack 20 degrees Celsius, it generally falls to at least minus 80 C every night.

But it’s the technology components that will bring the most wow factor. “We have microphones on this rover which for the first time will give us the sounds of descent and landing, and the wheels turning over the surface,” says Wallace.

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Then there’s MOXIE, the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment. The acronym needs some work, but MOXIE has moxie. “It ingests the Martian carbon dioxide atmosphere and using electrolysis it separates the oxygen out,” says Wallace. That means not just air for future explorers, but rocket fuel to bring them home. “MOXIE is a scaled demonstration of that capability that we’ll need in the future.”

The atmosphere is just one per cent as thick as the air on Earth, which makes Ingenuity an even more amazing add-on. Riding under the Perseverance chassis, Ingenuity is a tiny helicopter that will, after it’s dropped off, perform several test flights to become the first aircraft to operate on another world. Its metre-long twin rotors will spin at 2,400 r.p.m. (a typical Earth helicopter blade might do 500 r.p.m.) to generate lift.

“It’s a difficult endeavour,” says Wallace. “It’s a very aggressive, high-risk-high-reward experiment. We’re looking forward to getting it there and seeing it fly.”

Artist’s conception of Ingenuity, the must-have option on rovers this year. NASA

Seeing is Perseverance’s forte. In addition to mounting 19 cameras on various parts of the rover, NASA has added cameras to the sky crane, a powered descent vehicle that will, after being slowed down by a massive parachute, lower the rover to the ground on a cable before flying away.

“For the first time, we’re going to have high-definition video of a spacecraft landing on another planet,” says Wallace. “We’re going to have some really exciting imagery.”

One of Perseverance’s final tricks will be years in the making. The rover has the capability to collect and store up to 40 rock and soil samples that can be returned to Earth on a future mission.

“That’s really the point of the sample return,” says Wallace. “Making a claim that there was once ancient life on a planet other than the Earth is a fairly profound statement, and it requires a pretty high bar when it comes to proof. And the community has come to the conclusion that it can’t get to that level of understanding without bringing the full power of terrestrial scientific elements to bear on samples. The signatures are just too faint and varied to do that with the limited set of instrumentation that you can take to the surface.”

To that end, the rover will collect its samples and leave them on the surface for a so-called “fetch rover,” currently in development, to collect later this decade.

Or, says Wallace, “if the rover stays healthy, one option is to have our vehicle take it to the next lander and drop off the samples right there. The lander will put them into what’s called a Mars Ascent Vehicle, which is a small rocket, and put them up into orbit around Mars, and then an orbiter would rendezvous with the samples in orbit and collect those and bring them back to the Earth.”

If Perseverance is a late-model automobile, consider that the ultimate in curbside pickup.

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2020-07-30 10:16:48Z
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