#Ancient space program update#

And this was the contingency sample just in case they had to scoot right away.Īre there any concerns over possible contamination of Mars by Earth missions? With Apollo 11 on the moon, one of the first things the astronauts did after making sure they were safe on the moon is that Neil Armstrong suited up and collected samples very near the lander. This has been the case for pretty much every exploratory mission.Īnd that’s just in case things don’t last as long or work quite as well as hoped? You want to have what they call a contingency sample and some contingency studies. That’s in case something goes wrong with the mission a month or two down the road. And then, a big focus in the very near term is going to be acquiring a sample of rock and soil very nearby. They’re waking systems up, testing, making sure they are running. They’ve been using the cameras on the rover to look for interesting rocks in the vicinity to get samples of, but they really haven’t gone very science-heavy in terms of the rover right now. They’ve been using its robotic arm to extend and examine some of the rocks up close. They’ve really just started using the scientific instruments on the rover. Have scientists had an opportunity to have Perseverance analyze any rocks as they search perhaps microbial fossils? The main objective of the Perseverance mission is to search for evidence of ancient life on Mars in the Jezero Crater, an ancient lake which once appears to have been fed by a river. Most numbers I have seen ambitiously put humans traveling to Mars in the 2030s. In general, we know that good opportunities for launching people or spacecraft to Mars occur every two to two-and-a-half years. I’m pretty sure they do not, no one has a definitive timeline for that. I don’t know if they have a definitive timeline. Does NASA have a clear timeline for when it aims to send people to Mars? NASA’s Artemis mission aims to put humans back on the moon by 2024 – but that is an ambitious deadline and I think most observers expect that date to slip back. With prototypes like MOXIE we can see what the efficiency of this process in practice on Mars. Presumably the idea is that once the technology is proven to work you would scale it up for a future Mars base or colony. With this particular experiment they only produced a small amount of oxygen. Taking advantage of what are called in situ resources would just open up so many doors for further exploration. We don’t want to have to carry all of that stuff from the Earth to space and then to Mars. So producing oxygen, both for astronauts to breathe and also as a fuel source – as an oxidizer for the rocket engines that would carry people and cargo off of Mars back to Earth - that’s vitally important. Mars’ atmosphere is almost entirely carbon dioxide, and it’s a very thin atmosphere. This seems potentially hugely significant given NASA’s plans to one day send humans to Mars. This is very much a prototype.Īnother first for NASA on this mission is that it has used an instrument called MOXIE to convert Mars’ carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere into oxygen. There is really very limited AI in the drone as far as terrain avoidance goes … but it does know when it is getting close to the surface of Mars so it can make soft touchdowns. That is to say that once the instructions are loaded into the drone it lifts based on the signals it receives from the Perseverance rover (which in turn receives those signals from Earth).

It is controlled completely autonomously.

How is the helicopter controlled given there can be a communication delay of up to 20 minutes between Earth and Mars? It opens up great amounts of terrain (and) you can obviously travel much further and much faster than you can rolling around on the ground. As we know here on Earth, getting up in the air really expands your horizons. The Ingenuity helicopter is really just a fantastic advance in engineering and capabilities for science. Let’s talk about some of the things that NASA has been doing on Mars since then: First off, for the first time ever it has flown a helicopter drone on another planet. You gave “Chicago Tonight” a preview of this mission just ahead of its scheduled landing on Mars in February. (Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / ASU / MSSS) The entire scene is inside of Mars’ Jezero Crater the crater’s rim can be seen on the horizon line beyond the hill. NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover used its dual-camera Mastcam-Z imager to capture this image of “Santa Cruz,” a hill about 1.5 miles away from the rover, on April 29, 2021, the 68th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. The following Q&A has been edited for length.

#Ancient space program update#

We get an update on the mission from local astronomer and space enthusiast Mark Hammergren.