NASA’s Perseverance rover completed a full Earth year on Mars after its successful landing on February 19, 2021. On the red planet, the rover has accomplished many firsts on its ambitious to-do list: collecting the first rocky cores from another planet; serving as a base station for an Ingenuity helicopter; extracting oxygen from the thin Martian air ; and set a driving record.
Last year, the one-ton rover landed in Mars’ Jezero Crater after traveling nearly 300 million miles in seven months. The landing is just the beginning of the first leg of an ambitious mission to see if life exists on Mars. NASA scientists have determined that Jezero Crater is an ancient lake bed that formed billions of years ago. The rover was sent to collect rocks from the crater and bring the samples back to Earth for future missions.
So far, the Perseverance rover has collected six core samples from Mars, with two more to be collected in the coming weeks. Scientists expect the rocks could provide a key chronology for the formation of Jezero Crater and the age of the lake that once stood there.
The rover was not only an important base station for Ingenuity, the first helicopter on Mars, but also tested the first prototype of an oxygen generator called MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In Situ Resource Utilization Experiment) on the Red Planet.
Perseverance recently broke the record for the longest distance traveled by a rover on Mars in a single day on February 14, which was nearly 320 meters. She ran the entire drive using self-driving software that allows the rover to find its own path over rocks and other obstacles.
Complete News Source : Hindustan Times
