gmtlight: Perseverance is the largest planetary rover.
On the afternoon of February 18, 2021 local time, the Perseverance Rover successfully landed on Mars, becoming the fifth successful landing Rover of NASA. Perseverance will collect samples on Mars and try to find evidence of life.
It's an exciting time for people on earth.
The $2.4 billion mission uses the Mars probe Perseverance to search for evidence of past life on Mars and store samples for return to earth in the future.
Let's take a look at the structure of the Perseverance.
Perseverance is a 2300 pound (1043 kg) Rover.
Perseverance's sample handling arm consists of a pair of components: bit carousel and adaptive caching assembly, which will be used to collect, protect and return these dust and rock samples to scientists. Bit carousel is made up of nine drill bits, which will be used by the rover to drill into the ground, pull samples and pass them to the interior of the rover for analysis through an adaptive buffer device. The system has seven motors and a total of 3000 parts and is responsible for storing and evaluating rock and dust samples.
A total of five imaging tools are installed on the Perseverance; the first is the supercam on the mast head (located in the large circular opening), and the second is the two mastcam-z navigation cameras in the gray frame below the mast. Lasers, spectrometers and supercam imagers will be used to examine rocks and soil on Mars to find organic compounds related to the red planet's previous life. Two high-resolution mastcam-z cameras can work with multispectral stereo imaging instruments to enhance the driving and core sampling capabilities of the Perseverance Rover.
One of the 10 scientific equipments of the "Perseverance" probe is called "moxie", which can produce oxygen from Mars' thin, carbon dioxide dominated atmosphere. once these equipments are expanded, they can help future astronauts explore Mars. This is an important space goal NASA will achieve in the 1930s.
In addition, a 1.8kg small helicopter named "ingenuity" will be suspended in the belly of the Perseverance and arrive on Mars. once the Perseverance finds a suitable position, the ingenuity helicopter will separate and conduct several test flights. This will be the first time that the rotorcraft will fly in an extraterrestrial sphere. NASA officials said that if the ingenuity helicopter flies successfully, future Mars missions may often use helicopters as "scouts" for probes or astronauts. Rotorcraft can carry out a lot of scientific survey work to explore hard to reach areas, such as caves and cliffs. At the same time, ingenuity helicopter is equipped with a camera system, which can take pictures of Mars surface structure with important research value.
Perseverance is the largest planetary rover.
