The biggest, most sophisticated Mars rover ever built — a car-size vehicle bristling with cameras, microphones, drills and lasers — blasted off for the …
The biggest, most sophisticated Mars rover ever built — a car-size vehicle bristling with cameras, microphones, drills and lasers — blasted off for the red planet today,30 July 2020. It was part of the US effort to ambitious, long-range project to bring the first Martian rock samples back to Earth to be analyzed for evidence of ancient life. NASA’s Perseverance rode the mighty Boeing-Lockheed joint venture United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket, lifting off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 5.20 pm IST. This was the third and final Mars launch globally in the month of July. China and the United Arab Emirates got a head start last week, but all three missions plan to reach their destination by February 2021, after a journey of seven months and 480 million kilometres. The launch went off smoothly, despite a 4.2-magnitude earthquake 20 minutes before liftoff that shook the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Ninety minutes after lift-off, JPL mission controllers established its first communication signal with the spacecraft. “The spacecraft is in good health and on its way to Mars,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine wrote on Twitter, some 90 minutes after liftoff. The plutonium-powered, six-wheeled rover will drill down and collect tiny geological specimens that will be brought home in about 2031 in a sort of interplanetary relay race involving multiple spacecraft and countries. The overall cost: over $8 billion. NASA’s science mission chief Thomas Zurbuchen pronounced the launch the start of “humanity’s first round trip to another planet.” “Oh, I loved it, punching a hole in the sky, right? Getting off the cosmic shore of our Earth, wading out there in the cosmic ocean,” he said. “Every time, it gets me.” In addition to addressing the life-on-Mars question, the mission will yield lessons that could pave the way for the arrival of astronauts as early as the 2030s. “There’s a reason we call the robot Perseverance. Because going to Mars is hard,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said just before liftoff. “In this case, it’s harder than ever before because we’re doing it in the midst of a pandemic.
