What is Mars 2020?

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Mars 2020

This week, a brief diversion from reader submitted questions, because NASA has had a busy summer! First they sent astronauts to the International Space Station aboard a SpaceX rocket on May 30, and this weekend they return home. Meanwhile, a few days ago, NASA launched the Mars 2020 mission.

Who was involved?

The great thing about NASA working with independent companies is that they can focus on multiple important projects at once. So while they partnered with SpaceX on the Dragon crew capsule, the folks at JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) in California were hard at work with scientists at ULA (United Launch Alliance) who built the Atlas V rocket for this mission.

Fun fact: Atlas rockets have been around a long time and played a really important role in the early space program. In addition to sending the Curiosity and InSight rovers to Mars in 2011 and 2018, an early Atlas rocket carried Mercury Astronaut John Glenn into space back in 1962 for his historic flight aboard Friendship 7, where he became the first human to orbit the earth! (1,2,3)

What is Mars 2020 all about?

A brand new rover named Perseverance is on its way to the Red Planet. Percy for short, the rover was named by Virginia 7th grader Alex Mather, one of thousands of students who entered an essay contest for naming rights. Its mission will be to search for signs of past microbial life and to gather rock and soil samples that could one day be sent back to earth for analysis. But, like Wall-E, Percy doesn’t have to spend its time on Mars alone. It has a companion, a robotic helicopter (!!) named Ingenuity by Vaneeza Rupani, and 11th grade student from Alabama. The 4 pound helicopter will experiment with aerodynamics in the Martian atmosphere—something humanity has never attempted before. How exciting right? Not only that, Percy will also be testing another experiment called MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment—scientists really love acronyms), an instrument designed to turn carbon dioxide into oxygen, so that future astronauts on the Red Planet will be able to breathe. (1,5,6)

Fans can even follow Percy on Twitter to keep up to date with the mission. On Thursday it tweeted this video about the launch:

When will it get there?

The Mars 2020 mission launched from Cape Canaveral on Thursday, July 30. During pre-launch interviews, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine explained that it was very important to keep the mission on track despite the COVID-19 pandemic because the earth and Mars must be lined up just right in order to allow a launch window, and that window only comes around once every 26 months. With aggressive goals for putting humans on Mars, no one wanted to wait another 2 years for the invaluable research that Perseverance and Ingenuity will be doing, so the teams worked hard to keep everyone safe and still launch on schedule. The flight is expected to take about 6 and a 1/2 months, with Percy landing on Mars February 18, 2021. Then it will spend at least 1 earth year, which lasts for 2 Martian years, exploring the landing site and looking for proof that Mars once supported living organisms. (1,6,7)

Fun fact: the morning of the launch there was a 4.2-magnitude earthquake in California, where the JPL team is based. Luckily, it didn't endanger the launch, which was all the way across the country in Florida.

Where will it land?

Perseverance will land in the Jezero Crater, an area just north of the Martian equator, where water is believed to have flowed long, long ago. Like the Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile Rivers on earth, if there was ever life on Mars, this 28-mile wide ancient riverbed may be the perfect spot to find evidence. (6)

Click here for an amazing picture of the landing site.

Why is the mission important?

Because Mars is so far away, the cost of sending humans there will be very high. In order to do it safely, scientists want to know as much as possible about the planet before the first human takes a single step. Just like you wouldn’t pack for a trip to Florida without checking the weather first and double-checking where alligators might be found, NASA needs to know as much as possible about things like weather patterns, seasons, temperatures, and radiation. They need to know what happened in the past and what might happen in the future, and to test as much of their new technology as possible, so that they can protect future astronauts and colonists. (8)

These many small steps for a robot will add up to one giant, massive leap forward for mankind. Godspeed Perseverance. May we all persevere through 2020 and beyond. 🚀

★ Want to learn more? Check out these awesome resources that helped me write this little #Science article.

Jean M. Malone - August 2020