The Five-Day Countdown: Mars Perseverance Rover

An illustration of NASA’s Perseverance rover landing safely on Mars. Source: CNET

With five days on the clock, the Perseverance rover, built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, is getting close to touching down. After being launched on July 30, Perseverance is scheduled to land in the Jezero Crater on Mars on February 18. Many events need to occur in a specific order during the final minutes of the rover’s nearly seven-month journey. The mission, aptly given the name, “Mars 2020” has four main objectives:

1. Look for habitability: identify past environments able to support microbial life
2. Seek biosignatures: find signs of possible past microbial life in those habitable environments, particularly in certain rocks known to preserve evidence of life over time
3. Cache samples: collect core rock and “soil” samples and store them in secure tubes on the Martian surface
4. Prepare for humans: Test oxygen production from the Martian atmosphere

Since the 1970s, spacecrafts have been sent to Mars. The different types of spacecraft have unique specialties. Orbiters take pictures as they orbit the planet and landers capture photos and information from their landing spots on the surface. Rovers are equipped with wheels and their speciality is moving around. They land on a given surface and drive around to different spots.