The Perseverance Mars rover will be stacked on Cape Canaveral Air Force Base on the United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket in Florida, a huge milestone ahead of the planned launch.
The 2020 Perseverance rover awaits liftoff at Cape Canaveral Air Force Base in Florida.
(Photo: NASA/KSC)
NASA's next Mars module has been assembled onto the rocket.
The Perseverance rover was placed aboard the United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket at Cape Canaveral Air Force Base in Florida, an important milestone ahead of the mission's official launch.
"I see a significant portion of the spacecraft being mounted on rockets," John McNamee, the project manager for the Perseverance mission, said in a statement.
"But this mission is special because so many people have contributed so much to this moment," said McNamee, who lives at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "I want to say to each of them that we have done this step today by working together and will continue to work together to send the Perseverance rover to Mars."
Crews will have payload units carrying NASA's Mars Perseverance rover mounted in place on its Atlas V rocket. This photo was taken at Cape Canaveral Air Force Base in Florida. (Image source: NASA/KSC)
A 60-ton crane at the top of the 41 Vertical Integration Facility (VIF) at the Cape Canaveral Space Launch Site on Tuesday lifted a protective payload aggregator fitted with Perseverance and its associated hardware 129 feet (39 meters) high and placed it on top of the Atlas V rocket, NASA officials said. Engineers then established the required physical and electrical connections between the spacecraft and the rocket.
The assembly process reaches the final stage of testing, and the rover and rocket can be evaluated separately or separately. NASA officials said the car-arrow combination would always be placed on the VIF. The vehicle-arrow complex will then be transported by train to the launch pad, which will take approximately 40 minutes to complete the 1,800-foot (550 m) displacement.
The Perseverance rover costs $2.7 billion and may not be sent to Mars; the mission's launch window can last forever. The window period used to be quite long, initially open, but the target date was delayed by 13 days due to dealing with several issues.
Whenever it happens, Perseverance will launch this summer and will land inside the Jezero Crater on Mars. The 28-mile-wide (45-kilometer) Jezero had a lake and a delta in ancient times, and rovers will look for signs of life in the area.
Perseverance will also do a variety of other tasks, from depicting Jezero's surface morphology, looking for groundwater ice, to testing experimental equipment for converting carbon dioxide from Mars' thin atmosphere to produce oxygen. In addition, the Perseverance rover will also collect and preserve dozens of samples, which will be recovered and returned to Earth by a joint NASA-European Space Agency as early as 2031.
On a long journey to Mars, Perseverance will have some special equipment: it includes a 4-pound (1.8-kilogram) Wit helicopter. If all goes according to plan, Witty will conduct several short test flights in the skies of the Red Planet, paving the way for future aerial exploration by the Mars Rotorcraft.
Related knowledge
Perseverance was built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for rovers in the Mars 2020 mission. The probe was launched on July 30, 2020 at 7:50 a.m. (11:50 UTC),[5] successfully landed on Mars at 3:55 p.m. California time on February 18, 2021, and landed at Jezero Crater. On March 5 of the same year, Perseverance completed its first flight test on Mars. Perseverance has a roughly identical appearance to Curiosity, carrying 7 scientific instruments, 23 camera lenses, and two microphones. The mission plans to probe the surface of Mars near Jezero Crater. Perseverance also carried a drone called Witty to accompany Perseverance in scientific research. On April 20, 2021, Perseverance successfully converted carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere into oxygen, the first oxygen production outside of Earth. On September 6, 2021, Perseverance successfully obtained the first Sample of Martian rocks. [10]
By Mike Wall
FY: Harvey Yu
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