FRIDAY, JULY 31 , 2020. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A
Politics & the Nation
BY JOEL ACHENBACHA $2.7 billion NASA r over, Perse-
verance, blasted o ff i nto c lear s kies
over Florida’s Cape Canaveral on
Thursday atop an Atlas V rocket,
the start of a nearly seven-month
journey t o Mars. After spending an
initial 30 minutes in Earth orbit,
the firing of an upper-stage engine
sent the spacecraft on its inter-
planetary mission. If all goes as
planned, the vehicle will deposit
the rover in a crater on Mars on
Feb. 18.
The mission, officially known as
Mars 2020, is designed to search
for signs of ancient Martian life.
The rover is supposed to obtain
samples of rock cores and soil that
could later be sent back to Earth
for study in laboratories.
“Sitting atop that rocket there is
one of the finest interplanetary
payloads ever assembled, and the
thousands of scientists and engi-
neers behind them — they would
have to be the finest team ever
assembled,” Abigail Allwood, a ge-
ologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion
Laboratory who is part of the sci-
ence team, said in an email as she
and her colleagues awaited the
launch. “This rover is going to kick
some astrobiological butt.”
Scientists and engineers at the
mission control center at JPL, in
Pasadena, Calif., had a doubly ex-
citing morning: They experienced
a modest earthquake just minutes
before blastoff. T hat got everyone’s
attention but didn’t throw off the
launch schedule.
The launch itself was flawless,
NASA reported, but there was
some midmorning drama as the
huge ground-based antennae used
by the space agency initially could
not properly lock onto the space-
craft as it hurtled at 25,000 miles
per hour away from the Earth. By
midday, the communication prob-
lem had been resolved, and the
data from the spacecraft was being
analyzed.
“A ll the indications that we
have, and we have quite a few, is
that the spacecraft is just fine. It’s a
very stable spacecraft,” Mars 2020
Deputy Project Manager Matthew
T. Wallace said at a post-launch
news conference. Noting that the
spacecraft was spinning 2.5 times
per minute, he said, “It’s like a
spinning top. You can’t knock it
over.”
The rover is the successor to the
still-operating Curiosity rover,
which h as made breakthrough dis-
coveries, including finding com-
plex organic molecules of the type
that could be associated with liv-
ing things. Perseverance is superfi-
cially similar to Curiosity but has a
different suite of instruments that
will allow it to inspect and take
images of rock formations in far
greater detail.
It has a drill for obtaining rock
cores and soil samples, which the
rover will stash in containers.
NASA hopes to send another rover
in 2026 that would collect t he sam-
ples and launch them into Mars
orbit. Another spacecraft wouldcarry them back to Earth, with a
targeted arrival of 2031.
The mission is the first leg of
what is known as the Mars Sample
Return campaign. Returning sam-
ples of Mars to Earth has been the
highest priority of the planetary
science community.
It’s possible there is life on Mars
today, said Bruce Jakosky, a plane-
tary scientist at the University of
Colorado and the lead scientist on
a Mars orbiter that is studying the
atmosphere of the planet. If so,
that life would probably be deep
underground in porous rock
where water is liquid.
“We’ve learned that Mars has
seasons and an atmosphere that
behaves in many ways similar tothe Earth’s. Mars has geology that
is very reminiscent of what we see
on Earth — volcanoes, river chan-
nels. Mars has polar caps. And the
climate has varied through times
on many different time scales. Liq-
uid water was a bundant early in its
history,” Jakosky said.
If all goes as planned, the rover
will make a pinpoint landing in
Jezero Crater, a site carefully
picked by scientists for its plausi-
ble habitability in a distant era
when Mars was warmer and wet-
ter. The crater was once filled with
water, and a river flowed into it,
depositing sediments in a deltathat is enticing to the scientists
who will operate the rover remote-
ly.
This mission will shine light on
“the potential biological history of
Mars, and, of course, by doing so,
also create a better understanding
and basis for future human mis-
sions,” said Thomas Zurbuchen,
NASA’s top science administrator.
As with all Mars missions, this
one is fraught with promise and
peril. Mars is notoriously difficult
to explore with robotic probes,
many of which have failed in some
fashion upon reaching the planet.
“I find myself awake at nightthinking a bout it,” Zurbuchen said.
At the post-launch news confer-
ence, he said: “I’m relieved. It’s a
space mission now, and it’s on the
way to Mars.”
The novel coronavirus pandem-
ic has slowed many NASA mis-
sions, but this one had a deadline
imposed by orbital physics:
There’s a n arrow window when the
Earth and Mars are properly posi-
tioned. Perseverance had to
launch by Aug. 15. Otherwise, the
mission would have been delayed
by a couple of years until the plan-
ets were back in the right position.
[email protected]NASA’s new rover Perseverance rockets to Red Planet
JOEL KOWSKY/NASA/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK
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