Paris:
The bundle of instruments identified as SuperCam on board the Perseverance Mars rover has collected its initially samples in the hunt for previous life on the Red Planet, mission scientists stated Wednesday.
The return to Earth years from now of the rocks and soil it retrieves “will give scientists the Holy Grail of planetary exploration,” Jean-Yves le Gall, president of France’s National Centre for Space Studies (CNES), which mainly constructed the mobile observatory, commented by way of a YouTube broadcast.
These “pieces of Mars”, he stated, may possibly “finally answer this fascinating and fundamental question: was there ever life elsewhere than Earth?”
After seven months in space, NASA’s Perseverance rover gently set down on Martian soil final month and sent back black-and-white pictures revealing the rocky fields of Jezero Crater, just north of the Mars equator.
“The critical component of this astrobiology mission is SuperCam,” stated Thomas Zurbuchen, deputy head of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.
Mounted on the rover’s mast, the shoebox-sized gizmo is packed with spectrometers, a laser, and an audio recording device to analyse the chemistry, mineralogy and molecular composition of Mars’ famously red surface.
SuperCam’s laser can zap objects smaller sized than a pencil point from as far away as seven metres (20 feet), and enables the observation of spots beyond the attain of the rover’s robotic arm.
“The laser is uniquely capable of remotely clearing away surface dust, giving all of its instruments a clear view of the targets,” stated Roger Wiens, an engineer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and SuperCam principal investigator.
The mission suffered a really serious mishap ahead of liftoff, revealed LANL’s Scott Robinson, who stated more than 500 engineers and scientists contributed to the project.
“The mast unit optics were destroyed in a freak accident just four months before delivery,” he explained. “The team scambled to pull together spare parts to rebuild the telescope from scratch.”
The accident turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
A “freak accident”
In reassembling the unit, engineers found what Robinson described as a “Hubble-like” flaw in the original mirror.
Shortly following the Hubble Space Telescope’s launch in 1990, operators realised that the observatory’s major mirror had an aberration — later corrected — that impacted the clarity of pictures.
Scientists think that about 3.5 billion years ago the crater in which Perseverance landed was residence to a river that flowed into a deep lake, depositing sediment in a fan-shaped delta.
The rover is tasked with collecting more than two dozen rock and soil samples in sealed tubes, to be sent back to Earth sometime in the 2030s for evaluation.
About the size and weight of an SUV, Perseverance is equipped with a two-meter (seven-foot) robotic arm, 19 cameras, two microphones as nicely as other cutting-edge instruments.
A little helicopter drone tucked beneath its belly will try the initially powered flight on an additional planet in a handful of weeks’ time.
One instrument on board is made to make oxygen from Mars’ mostly carbon dioxide atmosphere, some thing that would significantly facilitate human habitation.
Perseverance is the fifth rover to set wheels down on Mars, all of them from NASA. The feat was initially achieved in 1997.
Its core mission lasts just more than two years, but the rover could stay operational nicely beyond that.
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