WASHINGTON — NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover will quickly begin depositing a cache of samples that it has collected since touchdown final 12 months as a part of efforts to finally return these samples to Earth.
At an internet briefing Dec. 16 held in the course of the Fall Assembly of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), undertaking officers mentioned the rover is scheduled to position the primary of 10 pattern tubes on the floor as quickly as Dec. 19. Affirmation the tube was efficiently positioned on the floor would are available photos returned the following day.
Perseverance is depositing the tubes to create a depot that might be retrieved by later missions within the general Mars Pattern Return (MSR) marketing campaign. It is going to function a backup to Perseverance itself, which is able to preserve different tubes and return them to a future Pattern Retrieval Lander.
That lander will carry two helicopters, based mostly on the Ingenuity helicopter included on the Perseverance missions, that can fly from the lander to the cache, choosing up a tube at a time and returning them to the lander. That method, as outlined in a revised Mars Sample Return strategy released in July, does away with a rover that may choose up samples, decreasing the general value of the mission.
The cache is situated in a area known as Three Forks that may also function the touchdown website for the long run Pattern Retrieval Lander. “One can be hard-pressed to think about a extra benign place,” mentioned Michael Meyer, lead scientist of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters. The terrain is flat with few rocks or different obstructions. “The floor is sort of a pool desk, actually boring.”
The tubes won’t be dropped in a single place however as a substitute unfold out over dozens of meters. “There are plenty of totally different necessities about how far aside the tubes might be to permit the retrieval,” mentioned Justin Maki, Mars 2020 imaging scientist on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Among the many greatest is inserting them far sufficient aside that helicopters can choose them up with out disturbing the remainder of the cache.
The result’s an intricate sample with the ten tubes positioned between 5 and 15 meters aside from each other. Depositing them requires finishing up a “extremely choreographed and strategically coordinated” plan, mentioned Katie Stack Morgan, deputy undertaking scientist at JPL. That course of will take one to 2 months, she estimated.
As soon as the depot is full, Perseverance will proceed its science mission, heading out of the ground of Jezero Crater and onto the highest of the delta created by the traditional river that flowed into the crater. The rover will proceed as much as the crater rim and maybe past, amassing extra samples alongside the way in which.
The creation of the depot may also mark a change in sampling technique for Perseverance. “Throughout this prime mission, the sampling method taken by Mars 2020 has been to gather paired samples,” mentioned Meenakshi Wadhwa, MSR principal scientist at Arizona State College. One tube of every pair can be positioned within the cache and the opposite retained on the rover.
After finishing the cache, Perseverance will swap to a “single pattern technique,” mentioned Stack Morgan, amassing just one pattern at a time. “We will take into consideration extra places and extra sorts of rocks we will pattern.” Perseverance has crammed 21 of its 43 tubes up to now.
Helicopter improvement
As Perseverance deposits pattern tubes because the depot, engineers are engaged on the design of the helicopters that may choose them up.
That effort began in earnest about six months in the past, when MSR managers requested the Ingenuity workforce if a helicopter based mostly on that design might be used to select up pattern tubes, mentioned Teddy Tzanetos, supervisor for Pattern Restoration Helicopter at JPL, throughout one other AGU Fall Assembly briefing Dec. 12. There had been some earlier research, he mentioned, trying on the feasibility of utilizing an Ingenuity-based helicopter for transporting pattern tubes.
The brand new helicopter is much like Ingenuity, with the most important variations being the addition of a robotic arm to select up pattern tubes and wheels on every of its 4 touchdown legs. It weighs 2.3 kilograms, about half a kilogram greater than Ingenuity, and might carry a 150-gram pattern tube. Different traits, together with its most velocity, vary and flight time, are the identical as Ingenuity.
“We wish to, the place we will, depend on heritage, and the place acceptable, deviate from that heritage to generate this new functionality,” he mentioned. “However we’re largely leveraging the entire wonderful classes discovered that we’ve discovered, and can proceed to be taught, from Ingenuity during the last 12 months and a half.”
Retrieving a pattern will take 4 sols, or Martian days. On the primary sol, the helicopter will fly from the Pattern Retrieval Lander to a touchdown website a number of meters from the tube. On the second sol, the helicopter will roll as much as the tube and grapple it. On the third sol, the helicopter will fly again to the lander, and on the fourth sol roll into place in order that the lander’s robotic arm can take the tube.
“We’re actually a fusion now of a small little rover that may fly, or you may give it some thought as a small helicopter that may drive,” Tzanetos mentioned.
He mentioned the brand new helicopter can leverage the design in Ingenuity due to conservative margins within the design of Ingenuity, in order that the brand new one might be heavier with none main adjustments. “We’re going to maintain testing that to see how a lot additional we will push our outdated heritage design. We’re going to be making some choices within the months forward of us about how a lot of our heritage that we wish to preserve versus how a lot can we wish to change.”
Ingenuity, in the meantime, continues to function on Mars, far exceeding authentic plans for not more than 5 flights. On the Dec. 12 AGU briefing, Håvard Grip, chief pilot for Ingenuity, famous that earlier than the primary flight the undertaking created a logbook for recording the flights. “A guide with solely 5 pages goes to look too foolish, so we put a bunch of additional pages in right here, simply so it could appear to be an actual guide.”
Ingenuity made its thirty sixth flight Dec. 10, touring 110 meters in a single minute. “Guess what?” Grip mentioned. “We’re out of pages.”
