It has been nearly a month since the Perseverance Mars rover successfully landed on the red planet to acclaim from scientists and spectators millions of miles away.
The rover has been busy since landing in the northeastern Jezero crater and has conducted multiple tests in preparation for its next missions, deploying its mechanical arm and observing its new home.
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Perseverance, or ‘Percy’, is tasked with searching for traces of ancient microbial life, in addition to collecting and storing samples for later return to Earth.
That trip is planned for no earlier than 2031 after Percy collects about 30 tubes of Martian rock and sediment.
The robber arrived on March 13 dropped his “belly pan”, or the protective enclosure protecting its sampling system.
In addition, the rover has housed a stowaway for its second mission – the first-ever Mars helicopter, aptly named Ingenuity – which will be tested in June.
While one of the next steps for Percy and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineers is to drive from the renamed “Octavia E. Butler Landing” site for a place to test Ingenuity, the rover was able to accomplish a lot.
With the SuperCam’s advanced, high-definition imaging and audio recording capabilities, all-new visuals and sounds have been beamed back to Earth, to the astonishment of scientists and citizens.
The SuperCam is a rock vaporization tool mounted on the “head” of the rover’s mast and will play an active role in selecting which rocks are worth investigating.
In a joint press conference with the Center National D’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) in France to update the public on their progress, NASA released audio from wind and the rover’s laser that maaz, one of its first rock targets, in addition to some of his first SuperCam. Remote Micro-Imager (RMI) measurements.
The historic recordings were released on March 10 and have now each been played over 900,000 times on the NASA SoundCloud page.
Just a few days earlier, NASA announced that Percy had made its first ride on the surface of the planet Mars, 6.6 meters long.
By monitoring the terrain, scientists have determined that several of the rocks they’ve seen are chemically similar to volcanic rocks, and that wind and water eroded them.
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Geologists told Nature science magazine that the wind patterns seemed to have blown the rocks mainly from the northwest and that darker-colored rocks that could have been weathered by water may have fallen into the ancient river delta that once flowed through the crater and lake.
While much of Mars’ astrobiological history is still unknown, Percy has allowed researchers a peek – crucial data for future missions.