[imagesource: NASA]

Earlier this year, NASA announced the name of its new Mars rover: Perseverance.

It’s the fifth rover to make its way to the red planet, following in the tyre tracks of Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity, which captured the sharpest-ever visual of Mars, giving us a unique look at the surface of the planet.

Perseverance is loaded up and ready for liftoff from Florida’s Cape Canaveral, on a mission to search for traces of potential past life on Earth’s planetary neighbour.

The rover is a car-sized robot which will launch atop of an Atlas 5 rocket from the Boeing-Lockheed joint venture with United Launch Alliance.

It will also be deploying a mini-helicopter on the red planet to test out equipment for future human missions.

Per The Telegraph:

“This is the ninth time we’ve landed on Mars, so we do have experience with it,” Nasa Administrator Jim Bridenstine told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday.

Image: NASA

Perseverance is due to land at the base of an 820-foot-deep (250 meters) crater called Jezero, a former lake from 3.5 billion years ago that scientists suspect could bear evidence of potential past microbial life on Mars. Scientists have long debated whether Mars – once a much more hospitable place than it is today – ever harbored life.

One of the most complex parts of Perseverance’s journey will be what mission control calls the “seven minutes of terror”, during which the robot has to survive extreme heat and speeds as it journeys through the Martian atmosphere.

Here’s what it will do when it gets there:

Rovers work in a similar way to a tourist or scientist exploring the planet. They take pictures, collect samples, and send information back to Earth for analysis.

Image: NASA

This is the latest launch from Earth to Mars in July. China and the United Arab Emirates sent probes up earlier this month.

The United States has plans to send astronauts to Mars in the 2030s under a program that envisions using a return to the moon as a testing platform for human missions before making the more ambitious crewed journey to Mars.

Perseverance will conduct an experiment to convert elements of the carbon dioxide-rich Martian atmosphere into propellant for future rockets launching off the planet’s surface, or to produce breathable oxygen for future astronauts.

Conditions are optimal, and the launch is all set to happen at 1:50PM SA time.

Check it out, here:

[source:telegraph]