After spending seven months in space, NASA’s Perseverance Rover landed on the red planet and dispatched black-and-white pictures revealing the rocky fields of Jezero Crater, simply north of Mars equator. According to mission scientists, a bunch of equipment often called the SuperCam onboard the Perseverance Rover, collected few samples to look for past life on Mars. Scientists will be given the Holy Grail of Planetary Exploration when recovered rocks and soil from Mars will return to the Earth after few years.
SuperCam, a key element of NASA’s astrobiology mission is a shoebox-sized gizmo packed with lasers. Recorder, and spectrometers can analyze the mineralogy, chemistry, and molecular composition of the unique red surface of Mars. SuperCam laser can detect the object which is smaller than the tip of a pencil from the distance of seven meters, allowing to observe out of reach of the Perseverance Rover’s robotic arm.
The Perseverance Rover is tasked with taking more than 20 rock and soil samples in the sealed tubers to be sent back in 2030 to the Earth. Scientists believe that the spot where Perseverance landed in 2012, is about 3.5 billion years ago, and had a river that flowed into the deep lake, and sediments were deposited in the fan-shaped delta. About the dimension of an SUV, Perseverance is supplied with the two-meter robotic arm, nineteen cameras, and two microphones, in addition to multiple cutting-edge devices. One of the instruments mounted on the rover is designed to make oxygen from the primary carbon dioxide environment of the Red planet.
Perseverance, a six-wheeled rover, is the fifth rover to set down on Mars, all of them are from NASA. It is set to explore the Jazero crater that shows all the promising signs of a place that was likely friendly to life on Mars in the distant past. The rover’s primary goal is to study the site in detail for its past conditions and seek the signs of a past life to identify and collect the most compelling rock core, which future missions could retrieve and bring back more detailed study to Earth. This mission could finally answer the fascinating and fundamental question: was there ever life elsewhere than Earth?
