Nasa’s Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover mission launched to Red Planet

NASA has recently launched its Mars 2020 Perseverance a fourth-generation rover.

Feature of the rover

• This Perseverance rover will carry a unique instrument, MOXIE or Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment.
• It is for the first time will manufacture molecular oxygen on Mars using carbon dioxide from the carbon-dioxide-rich atmosphere.

Advantage of MOXIE

• If oxygen can be successfully extracted on Mars in some significant scale, this can have two direct advantages:
• The oxygen can be used for human visitors to Mars, and second, the oxygen can be used to manufacture rocket fuel for the return journey.
• NASA can easily scale up the oxygen generation rate per day for MOXIE by a hundred times: this would be of great use for a future human mission to Mars if this technology demonstration is successful.
• Perseverance will carry Ingenuity, the first-ever helicopter to fly on Mars.
• This is the first time NASA will fly a helicopter on another planet or satellite.
• Ingenuity is a technology demonstration which is a challenge to fly the helicopter in the thin atmosphere of Mars.
• Perseverance is the planned first step to bring back rock samples from Mars for analysis in sophisticated laboratories on Earth.
• The analysis of Martian rocks on Earth will likely provide a reliable indication of whether life on Mars is feasible in the past or at present.

NASA’ S past generations of Mars rovers

• NASA’s incredible journey of driving on Mars started about 23 years ago, in 1997: when the Mars Pathfinder Mission with the Sojourner rover egressed on the Martian soil.
• Then in 2003 NASA send the twin rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, to
• It is followed by Curiosity in 2012.

UPSC