Here’s What Perseverance Is Doing On Mars Now

Want to know about NASA’s most advanced life-hunting robot on Mars? Well, here are some updates.

On the 30th Martian day of the mission, i.e. on 21st March 2021, the Perseverance rover released the debris shield that protects the ingenuity helicopter while landing. This helps the helicopter to rotate downwards and get out of the rover. This happened when a cable was cut by a pyrotechnic device.

Some Responsibilities

• The operations of ingenuity and Perseverance are built as well as managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory(JPL).

• NASA’s JPL is managed by Caltech located in California’s Pasadena.

• Malin Space Science Systems(MSSS) located in San Diego built a Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and Engineering(WATSON) camera. MSSS and JPL jointly operate the WATSON. WATSON located at the end of the arm of the rover’s robot took an image on the Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals(SHERLOC) instrument.

• The NASA Space Technology Mission Directorate(STMD), the NASA's Science Mission Directorate(SMD), and the NASA Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate(ARMD) support the demonstration activity of the Mars helicopter technology.

• We know that the main aim of the Perseverance rover is ‘astrobiology.’ Subsequently, these sealed samples will be collected and sent back to the Earth by the spacecraft. NASA will do this along with European Space Agency(ESA).

Some Motives Of The Perseverance Rover

1. The main motive is to collect promising pieces of evidence of life on Mars.
2. To convert the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into oxygen would be helpful for further manned missions.
3. Making the helicopter fly.
4. Clicking images.

After Dropping The Helicopter

Ingenuity was depending on the Perseverance’s power system for its survival. But now, to avoid the freezing and cracking of its unshielded electronic components during the challenging Martian night, it will have to run an important heater using its battery. The temperature during a tough Martian night can drop to -1300 F (-900 C). But the interior of the helicopter can be maintained at 450 F (70 C).

Also read: Perseverance Rover: Exploring Mars

Historic Selfie On Mars

This cannot be compared with the regular selfies we take as this selfie was taken about 362 million kilometers away from the earth. This historic selfie was taken by the rover on 6 April 2021. But this was a bit tricky and challenging. A 9 feet wide Perseverance along with the little ingenuity helicopter had to be present in the selfie on the Martian surface. The video shared by NASA’s JPL includes the sound of the twists and careful movements of the rover’s robotic arm to take 62 individual images. These images were clicked with the help of WATSON and then stitched together by the MSSS image processing engineers on Earth to make it look like a normal image. All these images were clicked for over an hour. 

When the images arrived on Earth, they had to clean the blemishes caused by the dust on the light detector of WATSON. Then they had to eliminate the joins to smoothen the image using software before finally warping the whole stuff into a single selfie.

62 images had to be clicked separately because the WATSON camera has been made to help in the scientific research by capturing close-up detailed images. It took over one week to plan an event of sending sequences and commands to the rover for moving its arm. Getting the ingenuity at the correct place was important too.

Such selfies help the scientists to check the wear and tear present on the rover. This work has been done beautifully as the mountain-like-looking elevations in the background and the prints of the rover’s wheels on the surface can be seen clearly.

Special software was created by JPL to keep the Perseverance’s arm from colliding with the rover. Arm’s trajectory had to be adjusted every time a collision was detected on Earth in simulations. This had to be done several times to ensure the safety of the arm’s motion. However, the main motive was to keep the robotic arm closer to the rover’s body.

Mastcam-Z

Perseverance rover has a primary science camera named ‘Mastcam-Z.’ But the main objective of making it was to examine the soil samples closely. Thus, its selfie range is not wide enough.

Martian Dust Storm

This video depicts the small dust cloud registered on 23 June 2021.

Conclusion

NASA had released the sounds of the wheels of the Perseverance rover fractioning against the Martian surface. Though it was much advanced and clear, it received some criticism. This time, a lot of remarkable work like providing a historic selfie, registering a dust storm, collecting life-evidences, and releasing the mini-copter done by Percy is mentioned in this post.