Skip to main content

NASA’s Perseverance rover has one final review to pass before launch to Mars

 

NASA’s Perseverance rover is almost certified as ready for its trip to Mars, launching on Thursday, July 30. This week, the rover passed its Flight Readiness Review. The next hurdle for the project is the final Launch Readiness Review which will take place on Monday, July 27.

Recommended Videos

The Launch Readiness Review will check whether all of the hardware is ready for the launch itself, giving final approval for the launch to go ahead. After this review concludes, NASA will hold a conference to announce its results.

Getting NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover to the Launch Pad

This launch represents the best opportunity yet to discover evidence of ancient life on Mars and is the culmination of years of work including several difficult months during the pandemic.

The payload fairing, or nose cone, containing NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover is maneuvered into place atop the Atlas V rocket that will hurl it toward Mars.
The payload fairing, or nose cone, containing NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover is maneuvered into place atop the Atlas V rocket that will hurl it toward Mars. The image was taken on July 7, 2020, inside the Vertical Integration Facility at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 41 in Florida. NASA/KSC

To prepare the rover for its launch, it was previously stacked with the Ingenuity helicopter, in a process during which the helicopter was placed on top of the rover and both vehicles were tucked inside a shell along with a parachute to help slow their descent during the Mars landing. The vehicles will land with the assistance of a descent stage, using a system called skycrane which was first used for landing Curiosity, Perseverance’s sister rover.

Please enable Javascript to view this content

The rover, helicopter, and decent stage were then transported across the country from California to Florida, where they were enclosed within the nose cone or fairing of the Atlas V rocket which will be used for the launch. With all these steps complete, the final review will certify that everything is safe and ready for launch.

“We’re pleased to be passing another milestone with the completion of the Flight Readiness Review,” Matt Wallace, deputy project manager for the mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement this week. “But we’ll keep our heads down through the final prelaunch activities and the opening of the launch window next week, until we’re certain this spacecraft is safely on its way. Mars is a tough customer, and we don’t take anything for granted.”

Georgina Torbet
Georgina has been the space writer at Digital Trends space writer for six years, covering human space exploration, planetary…
How NASA is using AI on the Perseverance rover to study Mars rocks
akdjf alkjdhf lk

Space engineers have been using AI in rovers for some time now -- hence why today's Mars explorers are able to pick a safe landing site and to drive around a region autonomously. But something they haven't been able to do before now is to do science themselves, as most of that work is done by scientists on Earth who analyze data and point the rover toward targets they want to investigate.

Now, though, NASA's Perseverance rover is taking the first steps toward autonomous science investigation on Mars. The rover has been testing out an AI capability for the last three years, which allows it to search for and identify particular minerals in Mars rocks. The system works using the rover's PIXL instrument (Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry), a spectrometer that uses light to analyze what rocks are made of. The software, called adaptive sampling, looks though PIXL's data and identifies minerals to be studied in more detail.

Read more
NASA to help with the launch of Europe’s unlucky Mars rover
An artist's impression of the Rosalind Franklin rover on Mars.

An artist's impression of the Rosalind Franklin rover on Mars. ESA/Mlabspace

Europe's unlucky Mars rover, known as Rosalind Franklin, has gotten a boost thanks to a new cooperation agreement with NASA. The European Space Agency (ESA) had previously partnered with Russian space agency Roscosmos on the rover project, but that was suspended following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Now, NASA has formally agreed to contribute launch services and parts of the landing propulsion system to the project, aiming for a 2028 launch.

Read more
NASA selects 9 companies to work on low-cost Mars projects
This mosaic is made up of more than 100 images captured by NASA’s Viking 1 orbiter, which operated around Mars from 1976 to 1980. The scar across the center of the planet is the vast Valles Marineris canyon system.

NASA is expanding its plans for Mars, looking at not only a big, high-budget, long-term project to bring back a sample from Mars but also smaller, lower-cost missions to enable exploration of the red planet. The agency recently announced it has selected nine private companies that will perform a total of 12 studies into small-scale projects for enabling Mars science.

The companies include big names in aerospace like Lockheed Martin and United Launch Services, but also smaller companies like Redwire Space and Astrobotic, which recently landed on the surface of the moon. Each project will get a 12-week study to be completed this summer, with NASA looking at the results to see if it will incorporate any of the ideas into its future Mars exploration plans.

Read more