Touchdown for Perseverance, the NASA rover on Mars. Here’s how it went and what Italy’s role is
Perseverance, the rover of the NASA mission, also carrying an Italian instrument, has landed on Mars
Touchdown for Perseverance on Mars.
On the evening of February 18, the rover of the NASA Mars 2020 mission successfully landed on Martian soil.
The site chosen for the ditching is the Jezero Crater, a large basin that once housed a Martian lake, in which ancient life forms are thought to have been preserved.
Perseverance is the cornerstone of the Mars 2020 mission, the first stage of NASA's ambitious Mars Sample Return program with the European Space Agency (ESA).
In the next 10 years – with space missions between 2020 and 2030 – the Mars Sample Return program aims, for the first time in history, to collect rock and dust samples from the surface of Mars to then analyze them on Earth.
The Perseverance rover has broadcast its first image of the red planet.
Thus began the mission of the US space agency to find out if, billions of years ago, the red planet hosted life forms.
All the details.
EXCEED "7 MINUTES OF TERROR"
After the "seven minutes of terror", the very delicate maneuver with which the vector went from 20,000 to zero kilometers per hour, the parachute opened and the robot began its adventure in search of clues to life.
NASA'S MARS 2020 MISSION
Launched on June 30, 2020, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory Mars 2020 mission covered nearly 3.9 million kilometers in just over seven months. It is the third to reach Mars in ten days, after the Hope mission of the United Arab Emirates and the Tianwen-1 of China .
Of the three missions, however, it will be the first to release a rover on Martian soil. The landing of the Chinese orbital satellite Tianwen-1 will be attempted in the spring.
Costing three billion dollars, the mission will last two years and, in addition to trying to answer key questions about the history and evolution of Mars, it aims to set a milestone on the road to the goal of one day transporting humans. .
FIFTH ROVER OF NASA TO TRAP THE MARTIAN SOIL
Perseverance is the fifth NASA rover to move its wheels on Mars.
Previous NASA Martian missions, including Curiosity and Opportunity, have suggested that Mars, billions of years ago, was a humid planet with a potentially suitable environment for life.
WHAT PERSEVERANCE WILL DO ON MARS
Perseverance will try to find traces, thanks to an instrumentation to analyze rocks and possible chemical traces of organic life, the so-called 'biosignatures' in the Jezero crater, which according to scientists was a lake. The rover will also collect samples from the Martian surface that in 10 years will be brought back to Earth by a joint NASA mission with the European agency ESA.
The rover has a whole set of new scientific instruments – from microphones, which will allow us to hear the sounds of Mars for the first time, to the first Martian helicopter, Ingenuity – including an Italian instrument. This is the LaRA (Laser Retroreflector Array) micro-reflector, created by the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) on behalf of the Italian Space Agency.
THE LAUNCH OF THE MARS SAMPLE RETURN PROGRAM OF NASA AND ESA
The Mars 2020 mission therefore marks the start of the Mars Sample Return (Msr) program of NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA).
The Italian industry also contributes to the program with the Leonardo group.
THE CONTRIBUTION OF ITALY WITH LEONARDO
The samples collected by Perseverance will be placed in containers and deposited in specific places. The recovery will take care of the mission scheduled for 2026 and in 2031 another mission will have to take them to Earth.
As part of NASA's 'Mars Sample Return' campaign, in collaboration with ESA, Leonardo signed a contract with Airbus for the advanced study phase (Advanced B2) of the robotic arm of the ESA Sample Fetch Rover (Sfr) . The Italian aerospace and defense giant has also obtained funding from ESA to continue the study of the Sample Transfer Arm (Sta) for the NASA lander.
Leonardo is designing and studying the prototypes of the two robotic arms of this mission in Nerviano (MI).
The first, smaller and more agile (it will have 6 degrees of freedom and will be extendable up to about 110 cm), will have to be mounted on the ESA Sample Fetch Rover, which will travel on the ground to collect the containers with a "pliers". The second, instead, more robust (it will have 7 degrees of freedom and will exceed 2 meters in extension), will be on the NASA Sample Retrieval Lander to move the containers from the rover to the capsule that will be launched into orbit.
THE ROLE OF THALES ALENIA SPACE IN THE THIRD MISSION MARS SAMPLE RETURN
For Msr, Leonardo will also contribute to the Earth Return Orbiter (Ero) through Thales Alenia Space who will be responsible for supplying the communication system that will allow the transmission of data between Earth, Ero and Mars. It will also design the Orbit Insertion Module and manage the Assembly Integration and Test (AIT) phase for the Proto-Flight model of the Ero probe, in its clean rooms in Turin and Toulouse.
The joint venture between Thales (67%) and Leonardo (33%) has in fact signed with Airbus Defense and Space, prime contractor of the program, the Authorization to Proceed (Atp) to contribute to the development of the Hero. The first tranche of the contract of approximately 11 million euros will cover the first development and design activities, while the global contract value is approximately 130 million euros.
Everything should end in 2031, with the return to Earth of the champions. The study of these samples will allow us to better understand the Red Planet, opening a new era for the exploration of Mars.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/touchdown-per-perseverance-il-rover-della-nasa-su-marte-ecco-come-andata-e-qual-e-il-ruolo-dellitalia/ on Fri, 19 Feb 2021 05:17:44 +0000.