NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover celebrated its year-long landing on the red planet on Friday, marking the year it began and stopped searching for evidence of ancient life on Mars.
The Perseverance rover will touch down on Mars at 3:55pm ET on February 18, 2021 in Jezero Crater, an ancient seabed that offers the best chance to search for signs of ancient life on the planet .
To celebrate, NASA is hosting a live Q&A tonight at 7:00pm PST/10:00pm EST, where scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory will review mission highlights from the past year, And hopefully the previews come for the wanderers.
While Perseverance will naturally get a lot of attention, it’s not heading to Mars alone.
Shortly after landing, Perseverance deployed the Mars Ingenuity helicopter, which is scheduled to become the first aircraft to fly on another planet on April 19, 2021. That anniversary is still a few months away, but in many ways it doesn’t seem to be more important than persistence itself.
In addition to more than a dozen flights on Mars that far exceeded expectations, Ingenuity provided important data and experience operating autonomous drones on another planet.
That’s critical for the upcoming Dragonfly reconnaissance mission, which is scheduled to launch in 2026 and land on Saturn’s moon Titan in 2034.
While the search for ancient life on Mars is important work, Titan is a world so rich in organic matter that it even has its own methane-precipitating “water cycle”, stagnant bodies of liquid methane on the surface, and evaporation.
Many of these processes mirror many found on early Earth, and so may hold the key to understanding how prebiotic organic compounds leapfrog living organisms.
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