NASAs most complex, ambitious rover yet is on its way to Mars [Updated]

Thursday 8am ET Update: An Atlas V rocket successfully launched the Mars Perseverance mission into orbit Thursday morning from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The rocket's upper stage has made the first of its two firings.

To achieve Earth-escape velocity, a second firing will end about 53 minutes after liftoff, after which the spacecraft will be released on its journey to Mars. It will arrive in February, at which time NASA will attempt to land its heaviest ever rover on the red planet.

Original post: NASA is about ready to send its largest and most capable rover to Mars. With a mass of 1.025 metric tons, the Perseverance rover is about 14 percent more bulky than its predecessor, Curiosity, which landed on Mars in 2012.

Because the two rovers are similar in size and appearance, it would be easy to dismiss Perseverance as a copy of Curiosity. But that would be doing a disservice to the newer rover, which is carrying some unique experiments and hardware to Mars. With these, NASA will dare to try new things on another planet and jumpstart the search for ancient life.

In short, this is an exciting mission.

NASA and its science division, led by Thomas Zurbuchen, deserve credit for pulling together this latest $2.4 billion Mars mission amidst a pandemic, with the coronavirus striking almost precisely at the moment when preparations for launch were most frenetic. "Together," Zurbuchen said, "We have persevered."

So here we are, on the eve of launch of the latest mission to Mars. A two-hour launch window for Perseverance opens on Thursday at 7:50am ET (11:50 UTC). The mission will launch on an Atlas V rocket, built by United Launch Alliance, from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Weather looks good—and it's a good time to go, what with a tropical system potentially bearing down on Florida this coming weekend.

Human tech

Like a number of increasingly capable rovers that NASA has dispatched to Mars over the decades, Perseverance will study the geology of the Red Planet to better understand its past and how it went from a warm, wet place to the cold, dry world we know today.

However, this rover will carry some new experiments that may help inform NASA as it plans for eventual human missions to Mars. To be clear, NASA does not currently have the funding or technology to send astronauts to Mars or get them home. Making such a mission affordable will likely require a new generation of reusable, low-cost, and capable vehicles—perhaps something like the Starship launch system SpaceX is developing.

Getting to Mars will require more than rockets and spacecraft, however. It will require a better understanding of the resources available on Mars and how humans might tap into them to make such expeditions more sustainable. For this purpose, Perseverance will carry an experiment named "MOXIE," which will seek to produce oxygen from Mars' thin atmosphere, 96 percent of which is composed of carbon dioxide. If this experiment is successful, it will demonstrate the potential for deriving liquid oxygen for rockets launching from the surface of Mars. The potential for mass savings is huge: oxidizer typically accounts for about three-quarters of the mass of rocket propellant, and being able to produce this locally would be a huge boon.

Perseverance will also carry spacesuit-material samples to the surface of Mars. The goal is to assess how these materials perform over time in the harsh conditions of the Red Planet. This will help engineers design hardy spacesuits for eventual human missions to Mars. "To my knowledge, this is the first human spaceflight hardware to actually fly to Mars," said Amy Ross, a NASA spacesuit engineer, dRead More – Source

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