Major Updates and New discoveries from Mars Perseverance !
. I'm pretty sure
you have already heard on this channel about the Perseverance Mars rover and the amazing
data it is retrieving from the martian soil. I'm also pretty sure that you've also seen the
little cute helicopter, Ingenuity, flhying on Mars' surface. It was amazing, right?
Imagine the happines of engineers at Johnson Space Center when they
managed to fly an helicopter on the surface of another planet.
Here's a picture of Perseverance.
And here's a picture of ingenuity.
Both pictures were taken before the launch, which happened on 30 July 2020.
Now they are ding their fantastic job some millions of kilometers away from us,
on the Red Planet. And every single day we receive and analyze data.
NASA's perseverance actually has its own blog,
where scientists update us in real time about what's going on on Mars. In this video
we are gonna discuss some of the major updates happened between January and April 2022. Enjoy!
===========================================
Perseverance started 2022 successfully coring and extracting a sample from a Mars rock.
At the beginnning, everything went smoothly, and the coring of Issole, as the team nicknamed the
It’s when the drill bit, with its sample tube and just-cored sample nestled inside,
is guided out of the percussive drill and into the bit carousel.
During processing of previous cored rock normal sample, the bit
travelled something like 13.1 centimiters before sensors began to record the drag,
which is a resistance, expected at first contact with the carousel structure.
But at a certain point, something else happened.
Suddenly, the sensor recorded higher resistance than usual at about 1 cm earlier than expected,
and some much higher resistance than expected during the operation. What the team did was
requesting additional data to ensure proper understanding of the state post anomaly. It took
about a week to receive the additional diagnostic data needed to understand what was going on.
“Armed with that data set, we sent up a command to extract the drill bit and
sample-filled tube from the bit carousel and undock the robotic arm from the bit carousel.”
This is what we can read on NASA's perseverance website.
The images confirmed that inside the bit carousel there were a few pieces of pebble-sized debris.
The team is confident that these were fragments of the
cored rock that fell out of the sample tube at the time of Coring Bit Dropoff,
and that they prevented the bit from seating completely in the bit carousel.
So basically Perseverance needed a debris removal. The team was confident they could continue with
the analysis, but this was the first time they were doing a debris removal and the wise choice
was to take the necessary time to ensure the pebbles exit in a controlled and orderly fashion.
“One thing we’ve found is that when the engineering
challenge is hundreds of millions of miles away,
it pays to take your time and be thorough.” this is what NASA's JPL said.
Were you guys expecting that one of the major challenges for Perseverance
was to get rid of debris?
Well, we couldn't wait for that to be done, because Perseverance was next headed back north.
The team made good and fast progress ejecting pebbles that became lodged in the carousel,
but two tedious and stubborn ones remained on the outside.
That's why the rover completed a little “bump” of 3 meters and finally the two
remaining pebbles shook loose. This happened on january 31th, 2022.
In the meanwhile, to prepare, the team has been taking long-distance observations
of the western delta where Perseverance had to go.
Pictures were taken with the Mastcam-Z and
SuperCam instruments. The observations included Mastcam-Z stereo images of the western part of
Artuby ridge that allowed scientists to create 3D models of the outcrop.
The team was starting to plan the observations, because with
Perseverance’s autonomous driving capabilities, they would be at the delta before they'd knew it.
====================================
Everything went quite smooth, and finally, on February 10th 2022, something amazing happened.
This was the day Perseverance set the recrord for the longest single-sol
total distance recorded by any martian rover. It was actually 243.3 meters long.
Oh, for those of you who don't know, a “sol” is how we call a martian day.
But let's go step by step.
This record was set thanks to the fact that Perseverance had already been on the same road,
so now engineers knew how to drive it and how to avoid major obstacles.
The place were they were headed is dubbed Séìtah, and where they came from was
Octavia E. Butler Landing. Now they were heading towards Octavia again.
JPL said that as they drove towards Séítah earlier in the mission, their average daily drive distance
was shorter, in part because they were doing scientific reconnaissance at important stops
along the way, and in part because they were still learning how to maximize drive efficiency with the
rover. Now, on the return trip back to Octavia E. Butler Landing, they were speeding back!
At the end of sol 341, Perseverance was currently in front of an outcrop called “Rimplas,”
for a quick abrasion and proximity science pit stop on its way back
This location is close to where Perseverance was on sol 177 almost 170 sols before,
near the Artuby outcrop where it saw intriguing layered rocks.
“We now understand these layered rocks to be part
of the Artuby “member”,a group of rocks with common characteristics”, JPL said.
And here we are now, it's April 1st 2022, and Perseverance is in a drive campaign
going faster than any previous rover. Its speed is something under a tenth of a mile per
hour, but it is way faster than its predecessors. Moreover, this has allowed Perseverance to break
previous rovers' records in terms of distance, as we've already said.
For example, Curiosity was making a number of drives over 100 meters,
but it never reached the 200. This however was not due to a lack of qualities.
It was just because the terrain was rockier. For instance, Opportunity which landed way
back in 2004, had some very smooth patches of terrain, allowing it to travel up to 228 meters
in one single dat using solar power. But one thing is sure: it's not enough
to set a long distance record. In these cases, what really
matters is to put together a contiuous campaign This requires energy, time and enough data volume
to Earth to support next-day drive decisions. Perseverance seems to have all of that, allowing
the team to put together a sustained campaign that has met and actually exceeded expectations.
Speaking of this, as of Friday, March 25th, 2022, which was Sol 389, Perseverance
had driven a total of 6.6 km (4.1 miles). In terms of overall distance, Perseverance has a
lot left if it wants to catch up with Opportunity (45 km) or Curiosity (over 27 km). Who knows,
maybe Perseverance will eventually surpass these other rovers, we can only wait and see.
Did you know that you can watch the progress of Perseverance in real time?
Check it out at the link in description:
https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/mission/where-is-the-rover/
“Also, if you are enjoying the video, consider liking or disliking it so that we can continue
to improve and make these videos better for you the viewer. Plus, be sure to click the
bell and subscribe to the channel so that you don't miss ANY of our weekly videos."
Speaking of records, Ingenuity’s longest single-day flight was 625 m,
logged back in July 2021.
As of April 1st, Ingenuity was currently heading northwest across Seitah,
aiming to rendezvous with Perseverance near the delta.
========================================= And the last update came on April 15th.
The previous week, Perseverance made its way through to the Delta.
The next weeks will be exciting because...we don't know much about the delta, and data
could bring any kind of new discoveries! If you are a geologist, for example,
the excitement of the delta comes from not knowing what is coming next.
Every image that is returned by the rover of the delta rocks will be kind of unique.
But...what's a delta? Well, as we know studying
the ones on Earth, a delta forms when a sediment laden river runs into a body of standing water,
and as it does so, slows and can no longer hold the sediment, so it drops the rocks,
gravel and soil into the water body, which gently sinks to the bottom and forms a delta.
Over time, the delta layers, like an book with pages, and we can turn it over each
day to leatn more about this beautiful novel, whichh is the history of Mars.
Maybe the most intriguing possibility is that we may find fossilized traces
of ancient Martian life in these delta rocks.
In one scenario, life might have got started something like 4 billion years ago,
when Mars was probably more friendly to life, and was preserved in the watershed
until one fateful day when they were washed into the river system, and then the crater.
As we can read on JPL's blog,
“These interesting rocks will arrive somewhat randomly to us as we explore the delta,
one can appreciate that everyday of the year-long “Delta campaign” will be exciting
for every scientist on the team, because every day could be the day we hit it big. Real big.”
Well done, guys: we reached the end of this video!
In short, Perseverance reached some milestones. It has tested out all of its engineering
capabilities, driven 2.6 km over rough terrain and taken tens of thousands of photos with
its 19 cameras. Of all of these incredible successes, there are three major milestones
that we’re particularly excited about: collecting the first rock core samples, flying the Ingenuity
helicopter and publishing our first scientific results about the so called Jezero Crater delta.
"This video ends here! Thanks for watching everyone!
What do you think about Perseverance rover? Did you know about the existence of Ingenuity? Let us
know in the comments below, be sure to subscribe, and I'll see you next time on the channel!"