{"id":12302,"date":"2020-07-30T23:59:33","date_gmt":"2020-07-30T15:59:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/nasas-perseverance-rover-leaves-earth-bound-for-mars\/"},"modified":"2020-07-30T23:59:33","modified_gmt":"2020-07-30T15:59:33","slug":"nasas-perseverance-rover-leaves-earth-bound-for-mars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/nasas-perseverance-rover-leaves-earth-bound-for-mars\/","title":{"rendered":"NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover leaves Earth bound for Mars"},"content":{"rendered":"
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NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover lifts off Thursday from Cape Canaveral aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket. Credit: Alex Polimeni \/ Spaceflight Now<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Persevering through a global pandemic, a last-minute earthquake, and the trials of a rocket launch, NASA\u2019s next Mars rover \u2014 named Perseverance \u2014 took off from Cape Canaveral Thursday on a nearly seven-month journey to the Red Planet with sophisticated science instruments, technology to collect samples for to Earth, and the first interplanetary helicopter that could produce a \u201cWright Brothers moment\u201d on another world.<\/p>\n

The $2.7 billion Mars 2020 billion mission is poised to achieve numerous firsts on the Red Planet, but first it had to leave Earth on top of a powerful rocket to kick off a 300-million-mile (nearly 500-million-kilometer) voyage through the solar system.<\/p>\n

An Atlas 5 rocket built by United Launch Alliance \u2014 a 50-50 joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin \u2014 gave the Perseverance rover a perfect ride into space Thursday after lifting off from Cape Canaveral at 7:50 a.m. EDT (1150 GMT).<\/p>\n

Four solid rocket motors and a Russian-made RD-180 main engine gave the Atlas 5 and the Perseverance rover their initial boost into space. An RL10 engine on the Centaur upper stage, fueled by an efficient mix of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants, fired two times to accelerate the Mars-bound rover to a velocity of nearly 25,000 mph (more than 11 kilometers per second).<\/p>\n

That was enough speed to allow the 9,000-pound (4.1-metric ton) spacecraft to break free of the grip of Earth\u2019s gravity and head into deep space.<\/p>\n

The Perseverance rover is the centerpiece of NASA\u2019s Mars 2020 mission, which will seek signs of ancient microbial life forms that scientists believe could have populated the Red Planet billions of years ago.<\/p>\n

The six-wheeled rover is essentially a robotic geologist, but it also hosts trailblazing technologies that will pave the way for future missions. Those include NASA\u2019s Mars Helicopter, named Ingenuity, and an experiment to demonstrate the production of oxygen from carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re doing transformative science,\u201d said Matt Wallace, the Mars 2020 mission\u2019s deputy project manager at JPL, before the mission\u2019s launch. \u201cReally, for the first time, we\u2019re looking for signs of life on another planet, and for the first time we\u2019re going to collect samples that we hope will be part of the first sample return from another planet.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The Atlas 5 rocket with the Mars 2020 spacecraft exceeded the speed of sound just 35 seconds after liftoff. Credit: Stephen Clark \/ Spaceflight Now<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Atlas 5 launcher performed flawlessly Thursday, deploying the Mars 2020 spacecraft right on its predicted course nearly one hour after liftoff. The Centaur upper stage spun up to about 2 rpm before releasing the spacecraft.<\/p>\n

The rocket injected the probe into an orbit between the planets around the sun, setting the stage for a cruise to Mars that will culminate in a high-stakes, one-shot attempt to land on Red Planet on Feb. 18, 2021.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe orbital parameters look dead on,\u201d said Omar Baez, NASA\u2019s launch director for the Mars 2020 mission. \u201cOur velocity is dead on. So we\u2019re on our way to Mars. There\u2019s no way back.\u201d<\/p>\n

While the Perseverance rover itself won\u2019t come back from Mars, some of the hardware on-board the vehicle is designed to eventually return to Earth. The rover carries 43 tubes, each about the size of a slim cigar, to hold rock and soil samples collected after Perseverance\u2019s landing. The vehicle will drop the tubes on the surface of Mars for retrieval by another robotic mission in the late 2020s, which will bring the specimens back to Earth.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe mission objectives of our effort are to explore the geology of our landing site, to look for signs of biosignatures from the past,\u201d said Adam Steltzner, chief engineer on the Mars 2020 mission at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. \u201cWe are not a life detection mission. We are looking for signs of past life on the surface of  Mars. Also, signatures that Mars was habitable, and to the degree that is still habitable, where it might be habitable. Our third objective is to prepare a returnable cache of samples, and then fourth is to prepare for future human exploration.\u201d<\/p>\n

While the launch itself was as advertised, ground controllers at JPL initially had trouble establishing a two-way communications link with the Mars 2020 spacecraft after it separated from the Atlas 5 rocket. Right on time, at 9:15 a.m. EDT (1315 GMT), the spacecraft turned on its transmitter and began sending a carrier signal to a NASA ground station in Australia.<\/p>\n

But the Deep Space Network station is usually attuned to listening for faint signals from distant regions of the solar system. The high-power signal coming from the Mars 2020 spacecraft saturated the antenna\u2019s receiver, so operators had to adjust settings at the ground station to begin deciphering telemetry information the probe was sending back to Earth shortly after launch Thursday.<\/p>\n