Perseverance, sometimes nicknamed "Percy", is a Mars rover manufactured by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for use in NASA's Mars 2020 mission. The rover was launched on July 30, 2020 for Mars mission at 7:50 a.m. EDT, and is expected to land on Mars on February 18, 2021. The rover started off from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The target landing site of Perseverance Rover is Jezero Crater. Perseverance carries seven scientific instruments to study the Martian surface at Jezero crater. It carries 23 cameras in total, and two microphones. The rover is accompanied by the helicopter Ingenuity, which will help Perseverance to scout for locations to study.
Design
The Perseverance rover was designed with help from the Curiosity engineering team, and they are similar to each other. Engineers redesigned the Perseverance rover wheels to be more robust than Curiosity wheels, which have sustained some damage. The rover has thicker, more durable aluminum wheels, with reduced width and a greater diameter than Curiosity wheels. The aluminum wheels are covered with cleats for traction and curved titanium spokes for springy support. The combination of the larger instrument suite, new Sampling and Caching System, and modified wheels makes Perseverance heavier than its predecessor, Curiosity, by 17%. The rover will include a five-jointed robotic arm measuring long. The arm will be used in combination with a turret to analyze geologic samples from the Martian surface. The rover's power generator has a mass of and uses of plutonium dioxide as the source of steady supply of heat that is converted to electricity. The electrical power generated is approximately 110 watts at launch with little decrease over the mission time. Two lithium-ion rechargeable batteries are included to meet peak demands of rover activities when the demand temporarily exceeds the MMRTG's steady electrical output levels. The MMRTG offers a 14-year operational lifetime, and it was provided to NASA by the US Department of Energy. Unlike solar panels, the MMRTG provides engineers with significant flexibility in operating the rover's instruments even at night and during dust storms, and through the winter season. The rover's computer uses the BAE RAD750 radiation-hardened single board computer. The computer contains 128 Megabytes of volatile DRAM, and is run at 133 MHz. The flight software is able to access 4 gigabytes of NAND non-volatile memory on a separate card. Also travelling with Perseverance as a part of Mars 2020 is the Mars helicopter experiment, named Ingenuity. A solar-powered helicopter drone with a mass of, it will be tested for flight stability and for its potential to scout the best driving route for the rover over a planned 30-day period. Other than cameras, it carries no scientific instruments.
Instruments
Based on the scientific objectives, nearly 60 proposals for rover instrumentation were evaluated and, on 31 July 2014, NASA announced seven scientific instruments that would make up the payload for the rover.
Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment, an exploration technology investigation that will produce a small amount of oxygen from Martian atmospheric carbon dioxide. This technology could be scaled up in the future for human life support or to make the rocket fuel for return missions.
There are also a number of cameras, and for the first time on a Mars probe, audio microphones.
Two microphones will be used during the landing event, while driving, and when collecting samples.
19 cameras in total are included in the Perseverance rover.
"Send Your Name to Mars"
NASA's "Send Your Name to Mars" campaign invited people around the world to submit their names to ride aboard the agency's next rover to the Red Planet. Some 10,932,295 people submitted their names. The names were stenciled by electron beam onto three fingernail-sized silicon chips, along with the essays of the 155 finalists in NASA's "Name the Rover" contest. The chips were then attached to an aluminum plate. The three chips share space on the anodized plate with a laser-etched graphic depicting Earth, Mars and the Sun. The plate was then mounted onto the rover on March 26, 2020.
Perseverance launched during the COVID-19 pandemic which began to affect the mission planning in March 2020. To show appreciation for healthcare workers who helped during the pandemic, an 8 by 13 centimetre plate with a staff-and serpent symbol, was placed on the rover. Project Manager Matt Wallace said he hoped that future generations going to Mars would be able to appreciate healthcare workers during 2020.
