NASA has a very special Valentine’s Day delivery on the way to the Red Planet – one that could get us personalized gifts in a few years.
About once every ten years, the agency sends out a groundbreaking Mars landing mission to learn more about our potentially habitable neighbor. Its latest attempt is the powerful Perseverance rover, ready for landing on Thursday, February 18. (Bonus Valentine to you: You can watch the landing live here on Space.com, courtesy of NASA TV, and participate in a virtual NASA social event as well.)
Perseverance has a unique role in every Mars mission before it. This Mars rover will be wrapping presents for delivery to Earth – cached samples of rocks that show promising signs of habitability on Mars. Once NASA and the European Space Agency are ready, the two agencies plan to return the rover’s precious rocky gifts to us in about a decade, as part of a larger Mars monster return mission.
Related: Valentine’s Day in Space: Cosmic Love Photos
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Long-range messages, however, will flow back to us from the surface once the daring landing of the “seven minutes of terror” is completed. If all goes according to plan, Perseverance will soon deploy its instruments to scan the environment with high-definition cameras, lasers, microphones and scientific equipment, and return what it finds to Earth. Evidence of water activity and organic molecules at the landing site, in Jezero Crater, could be in scientists’ inboxes in a few weeks or months.
A bonus gift from Perseverance’s mission is the Ingenuity helicopter, a small test vehicle that will show us if flight is possible on Mars, given our current understanding of the rarefied atmosphere. Ingenuity could show us the way for future drones to scout forward on landing missions and to aid robots and humans alike by patrolling hard-to-climb environments.
The Perseverance landing follows the landing of NASA’s large Curiosity rover in 2012 – that rover is still moving as it picks up further evidence of organic matter and molecules on Mount Sharp – and the two groundbreaking Mars Exploration Rovers (Opportunity and Spirit) that have been inherited their 90-day warranty years after landing on Mars in 2004.
Fortunately, smaller missions on Mars are fairly common, and other spacecraft have surfaced safely between the major missions; the last successful one was the still-active InSight Mars lander in 2018. We also can’t forget that the arrival of Perseverance comes days after two other countries arrived safely on Mars: the Emirati Hope orbiter and the Chinese lander-orbiter-rover trio that makes up the Tianwen-1 mission.
According to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, you can safely and socially celebrate the Valentine’s Day Special Perseverance Mission in several cities across the United States, which will light their buildings red to celebrate the landing on the Red Planet.
- The Empire State Building in New York City plans to illuminate the tower in red between sunset Tuesday, February 16, and 2:00 a.m. EST the next morning (Wednesday, February 17).
- The pylons of the Los Angeles International Airport entrance gate will glow red from sunset Wednesday (Feb. 17) to sunrise Friday (Feb. 19). JPL, where the rover’s operations are centered, is located in nearby Pasadena.
- Residents of downtown Chicago should see the Adler Planetarium light up, along with other downtown buildings. (There was no exact timing available in the JPL release.)
NASA added that cities across the country and the world should feel free to have their own city burn red if they so choose.
You can find out how to virtually participate in the landing of the Perseverance Mars rover by signing up for NASA’s social media event here. NASA also has a “virtual guest experience” available for the public to participate in as well.
Visit Space.com Thursday for a full account of the landing of the Mars rover Perseverance on the Red Planet.
Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.