Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover Mission
Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover Mission
Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover Mission
On a warm, muggy summer morning at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, a few hours after sunrise on July 30th, 2020, NASA’s Perseverance Rover nestled on top of an Atlas V rocket launched on a one-way trip to Jezero crater, Mars. Ever since Wernher von Braun wrote The Mars Project in 1948 (first published in the U.S. in 1953), explorers and scientists have pondered the notion of returning tantalizing samples from Mars for scientific study and the human quest to answer the question if life has existed elsewhere in the solar system. In 1962 at NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC), formally the Manned Spacecraft Center, in Houston, TX, the first Mars Mission Study Group was formed to explore opportunities for human and robotic exploration of Mars, including returning samples to Earth. For almost 60 years, JSC scientists and engineers have supported many studies on Mars Sample Return (MSR) missions. Continuing this long tradition, NASA JSC scientists and engineers in the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science (ARES) Division are now contributing to the first attempt to return samples from another planet, the Mars 2020 mission, to search for evidence of past life on Mars.
In the next few years, the Perseverance rover will be actively studying the Martian terrains of Jezero Crater and potentially the surrounding area that together enables exploration of the oldest and most scientifically interesting landscapes Mars has to offer. Along these exploration traverses, Perseverance will begin to collect and cache samples on the surface. This will be the first of three missions in an international MSR campaign that is set to deliver the first Martian surface samples back to Earth in the early 2030’s. For over a decade, JSC ARES scientists have been working with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the greater NASA team to bring Martian samples back to Earth for scientific analyses. The MSR campaign, starting with the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission, is the most sophisticated mission to date to the Martian surface and will test both technological and scientific boundaries for planetary exploration. The search for ancient microbial life on Mars will advance NASA’s goal to explore habitability in the solar system. The tools onboard Perseverance will provide ARES scientists and the larger scientific community unique insights into whether life was once able to inhabit Jezero crater; the ability to bring samples back with MSR and interrogate them with the best laboratories on Earth will be transformational for unraveling the secrets of the Martian surface. Mars 2020 and the MSR campaign will set the foundation for future Mars exploration and pave the way for human expeditions.
Mission Conception and Getting Ready For Launch
In 2011, ARES scientists participated in the first Mars 2020 rover definition studies. After the addition of a sample collection and return architectural component in 2013, ARES scientists from the Astromaterials Acquisition and Curation Office began to support mission formulation and design of the primary sample tubes, witness plates, sample drills, and sample caching system with detailed attention to material selection and contamination control to sample intimate spacecraft hardware. This is critical for any return of pristine astromaterials to Earth to maintain the scientific integrity of each sample and ensure its long-term preservation for future scientific study. In addition, ARES scientists along with their JPL colleagues orchestrated the selection and collection of Mars 2020 Contamination Knowledge (CK) samples during the assembly, test, and launch operations (ATLO) at JPL and Kennedy Space Center (KSC). The CK collection is assembled from flight and non-flight reference materials, inorganic, organic, and biological witness plates/samples, and other materials from ATLO that could have the potential to cross-contaminate a future returned Martian sample. These reference materials and witness samples provide the scientific community with the fundamental ability to reconstruct the contamination/alteration history of the sample collection through the course of the mission, with the overall goal of guiding and strengthening the scientific conclusions drawn from the study of returned materials. The Mars 2020 CK collection is curated at the historic JSC building 31 awaiting the return of future Martian samples. With the anticipated construction in 2023 of the ARES Annex extension of bldg. 31, this Mars 2020 CK collection will soon have a new home in a state-of-the-art curation cleanroom laboratory. In addition, ARES scientists and engineers are already beginning to formulate novel sample handling and pristine BSL-4 containment technologies that potentially could be used in a future Mars Sample Receiving Facility.
Science on Mars and Selecting the Best Samples to Bring Home
The primary science objective of the Mars 2020 mission is to search for evidence of past life on Mars. In addition to the science objectives, Mars 2020 will test technologies that would help with human exploration of Mars. This includes both the Mars Oxygen In-situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) as well as monitoring the effects of the Martian environment on several next-generation spacesuit materials. The Mars 2020 mission will explore is about a 45 km wide impact crater that was selected as Perseverance’s landing site because it preserves the remnants of a river delta created by deposition of sediment into an ancient lake that has the potential to contain chemical biosignatures and perhaps even fossilized microbial life. More than 3.5 billion years ago, rivers carved out the upper reaches of the Jezero crater watershed, transported sediments downstream, and deposited these sediments in a lake that was once so full it breached the rim of Jezero crater. Evidence for this water-rich Martian past can be seen from orbit with the identification of clay minerals, which are commonly associated with water environments where we find life on Earth. Perseverance’s mission is to explore this rich geologic history, with an instrument payload geared towards unraveling geochemical, mineralogical, and astrobiological signatures left behind in the rocks and soils. More detail can be found at the Mars 2020 website.
Here at NASA JSC, ARES researchers will participate in Mars 2020 on-surface operational planning to help ensure that rover traverses encounter the most compelling outcrop locations where in situ analysis by the Perseverance payload can be conducted. In addition to on-the-ground science, Perseverance will perform a drilling campaign to collect samples for future return to Earth, enabling analysis in state-of-the-art laboratories. Our team will help decide which rock and soil samples to collect and which of the collected samples should be returned to address the most compelling science questions. We will also work with the Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals (SHERLOC) instrument and team to identify potential biomarkers and study the chemistry and mineralogy of geologic units in Jezero crater and surrounding areas. ARES team members developed and built the SHERLOC calibration target, which includes the next-generation space suit materials carried on the Perseverance rover that will enable the study of their stability and degradation under Martian conditions to help better protect future human explorers. Find out more about SHERLOC.
The ARES Mars 2020 Team
Members of the ARES team span expertise from mission planning, sample curation, contamination control, mission operations, and scientific research.