NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission is on its way to the Red Planet to search for signs of ancient life and collect samples to send back to Earth..
Forecasters predicted an 80% chance of acceptable weather.United Launch Alliance, a partnership between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, has launched 84 Atlas 5s since the rocket's debut in 2002, all of them successful. Starting July 27, news activities will cover everything from mission engineering and science to returning samples from Mars to, of course, the launch itself. "Fifty-seven minutes after takeoff, after boosting the spacecraft to a velocity of nearly 26,000 mph — fast enough to climb out of Earth's "gravity well" — the rocket's Centaur second stage will release Perseverance and its interplanetary support stage to fly on their own.Precisely aimed at a point in space where Mars will be next February, Perseverance will cap its arcing, 292-million-mile journey with a white-knuckle seven-minute plunge to touchdown in a 28-mile-wide crater that features the remnants of an ancient river delta and lakebed deposits that might preserve traces of past biological activity.The rover is designed to search for tell-tale "biosignatures" in Jezero Crater and to collect rock and soil samples that will be sealed in small tubes and left on the surface for recovery by a European Space Agency rover tentatively scheduled for launch in 2026.If all goes well, the samples will then be launched into Mars orbit by a NASA rocket, picked up by another European spacecraft and brought back to Earth in 2031.While sample collection is the primary goal of Perseverance's mission, the rover also is carrying a small But first, NASA has to get Perseverance safely to its target, a journey that begins at 7:50 a.m. EDT Thursday when the towering Atlas 5, carrying Perseverance in a mostly-empty nose cone, lifts off from pad 41 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
The Perseverance Mars rover, packed up for atmospheric entry and attached to a planetary cruise stage that will provide power and communications on the way to the red planet, takes up a fraction of the Atlas 5 booster's nose fairing.
And, of course, a very, very important mission for the world. But it is also the beginning of a series of missions that will eventually return samples to Earth. "About seven cold, dark, unforgiving months of interplanetary space travel lay ahead for the mission – a fact never far from the mind of Mars 2020 project team.
Right now, the Mars 2020 mission is completing a full health assessment on the spacecraft and is working to return the spacecraft to a nominal configuration for its journey to Mars. Charged with sending the first woman and next man to the Moon by 2024, NASA will establish a sustained human presence on and around the Moon by 2028 through NASA's JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and will manage operations of the Mars Perseverance rover. He covered 129 space shuttle missions, every interplanetary flight since Voyager 2's flyby of Neptune and scores of commercial and military launches. The large, structurally strong fairing is needed to handle the stress of Perseverance's high-speed launch. The United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket carrying NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover rolls out to … NASA "So that weighs on us and is ever present in our mind. NASA's Mars 2020 mission has already been delayed twice.
It's a tremendous responsibility. NASA's Launch Services Program, based at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, is responsible for launch management, and ULA provided the Atlas V rocket.For more about America’s Moon to Mars exploration approach, visit:Managed by the Mars Exploration Program and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate
Callooh! "There was so much that was put into preparing this spacecraft, thousands of people worked on it. We are going to Jezero Crater. Despite the booster's near-flawless record, Bruno said he takes nothing for granted and feels a "heavy" responsibility for getting Perseverance safely on its way.