on february 18th nasa's mars 2020
mission touched down on the red planet
since then its perseverance rover and
ingenuity helicopter have been exploring
the terrain and sending back never
before never-before-seen images and
video of the martian surface the mars
2020 mission mars perseverance
has had a string of firsts the first
sounds from mars
you know we can now hear the wind on
another world more practically it is the
first test of a new onboard navigation
system that gives a rover on mars uh
greater independence and how it can
guide itself around potential hazards so
we haven't just been driving we've
actually been continuing some of our
tech demos jennifer trosper is nasa's
perseverance project manager she's been
working on the mission for the past
seven years we took along two technology
demonstrations one is an instrument
called moxie that actually uses the
carbon dioxide atmosphere and then
produces oxygen and then of course the
other technology demonstration that we
have been successful with is showing
that you can fly helicopters on mars
now after over 10 months on mars what
have we learned from perseverance and
ingenuity that we didn't know before
and are we any closer to figuring out if
mars has what nasa set out to find
signs of ancient life
the only way to answer it nasa believes
is to do what they're doing now go to
another planet assess it thoroughly and
then attempt to find the chemistry and
fossils that will prove
one way or another
whether there is life of any sort we can
recognize on a planet other than our own
one of the most important milestones
took place in mid-august when
perseverance began collecting rock horse
samples nasa is planning to retrieve
perseverance's martian rock samples with
another spacecraft which is expected to
launch from earth in 2026 and arrive at
mars in 2028
one of the big unanswered questions that
nasa faces in its search for life and
the collection of these samples on mars
is
can we muster the
will
and the funding
and the engineering expertise to
actually bring these samples home
right now there are plans on the drawing
board there are speeches there are
intentions
but
it's a long time between now and the
2030s when these missions that are being
projected
uh being talked about to bring these
things home
in april the ingenuity helicopter became
the first craft to fly in the atmosphere
of another planet this technology
demonstration was one for the history
books
this helicopter which was initially uh
officially designed to carry out just
five flights as a technology
demonstration has been uh flying all it
seems sometimes continuously
the next flights tested the helicopter's
ability to move horizontally and it
covered longer distances in each
subsequent flight ingenuity has now
flown 18 times when we get over to the
delta ingenuity can again be used as a
scout to really point perseverance to
the best places scientifically
to go i think if she's still living we
have lots of opportunities for scouting
as we as we move forward in the mission
nasa selected jezero crater as
perseverance's landing site because it
gives the rover access to a large stack
of rocks that sits at the end of a dry
river valley
based on satellite images scientists
have theorized that these rocks are made
of sediment deposited by an ancient
river that flowed into a lake roughly
3.5 billion years ago so jezreel crater
is essentially if you're if you're
looking for signs of ancient microbial
life on mars this is a place to go it's
the location location location for
science for finding it because
of that delta that we see there nasa
selected its landing site because
scientists have long suspected the area
was once covered in water and therefore
had the potential for the development of
life as we know it but they only could
tell this in target this in the broadest
outlines from orbit
now they have boots on the ground or
wheels if you prefer
supplicate indicates she was deployed
perseverance landed more than a mile
away from the cliffs at the front of the
delta and started taking high-res
pictures to survey the distant rocks we
basically looked at the different
stratigraphy that we saw
and wanted to confirm that we were right
that this really is
a delta with a river inflow and it was
deposited and there was a lake here and
based on that we actually did were able
to confirm that on october 7th nasa
scientists published the mission's first
study in the journal science based off
those images the study found that for
potentially millions of years a river
flowed into a lake that filled jezreel
crater we actually have a set of samples
that is very good for the lower crater
area we have four core samples
we will have 30 that we can return to
earth we'll collect more than that and
then we'll down select and that earth
return is in the early 2030s
in december nasa scientists confirmed
yet another long-held suspicion that the
martian bedrock on which perseverance
rover has been driving since february
likely formed from red hot magma this
was a big surprise to us
certainly not what we expected to find
that these are in fact volcanic rocks
this is perseverance project scientist
ken farley speaking at a recent
conference about the finding
this was completely unexpected and we
are struggling to understand what it
means but i can i will speculate so this
appears to be a product that was either
intruded into or erupted into the crater
or flowed in from outside
but we don't know exactly how that would
work although it landed on the martian
surface in february perseverance's
sample return mission has only really
just started to get underway well the
core samples are the
hard evidence and i do mean hard
evidence of something that we have been
speculating about
uh for the longest time we want to have
some
tangible
evidence something that we can put under
a microscope something that we can run
genetic samples on something that we can
prove beyond a shadow of a doubt is not
the product of our creation but is the
product of a separate creation on
another world