This Wall Street Journal article was published 2 days ago before the Mars Rover was launched.

Wall Street Journal

NASA to Launch Its Most Ambitious Mars Rover Yet

Amid international space race, the $2.7 billion effort will seek signs of ancient life on the Red Planet

By Robert Lee Hotz

July 29, 2020

NASA is poised to launch its most ambitious robotic rover to Mars on Thursday, opening the next phase of exploration on the Red Planet.

The $2.70 billion National Aeronautics and Space Administration mission will seek signs of ancient life on Mars that can be packaged and, for the first time, returned to Earth. It will test ways to extract oxygen from the Martian air for future colonists and try out an experimental helicopter drone that could become the first craft to fly on another planet.

If all goes as planned, the NASA effort will be the third Mars mission of the summer. China and the United Arab Emirates independently launched maiden voyages to Mars earlier this month. Europe and Russia are set to follow with a joint Mars mission in 2022.

“A lot of countries that historically have not been exploration countries are stepping up in a big way and not just talking about it, but backing it up with budgets,” said NASA Administrator James Bridenstine. “We look forward to seeing what they are able to discover.”

NASA Planetary Science Division Director Lori Glaze said, “China’s sending their first lander to Mars. We’re all going to be watching that very, very carefully. This is an incredibly difficult thing to do. We know how challenging it is.”

NASA expects to launch its Mars Perseverance rover on Thursday from Space Launch Complex 41 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. It is the same launchpad from which in the 1970s the space agency launched its Viking probes, the first of eight NASA spacecraft to land successfully on Mars so far.

The two-hour launch window opens at 7:50 a.m. EDT. If weather or technical problems force a delay, the agency has until Aug. 15 to try again. If unable to launch by mid-August, the agency will have to wait more than two years for Earth and Mars to align again, storing the spacecraft at a cost of about $500 million, agency officials said.

“We are champing at the bit to take this nuclear-powered dune buggy to Mars,” said Tory Bruno, chief executive of United Launch Alliance, which makes the mission’s Atlas V launch vehicle.

If all goes well, the Perseverance rover is scheduled to land Feb. 18 at Jezero Crater, a 3.8 billion-year-old formation that once held a large lake and still bears traces of a fan-shaped river delta, NASA scientists said. Orbital images suggest it is rich in clay and minerals that might contain signs of microscopic life-forms from billions of years ago—if any existed.

“If life was going to start somewhere, this is a place that you would think you would be able to find it,” said astrobiologist Luther Beegle at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. He is the principal investigator for the rover’s Sherloc scanner, which will use spectrometers, a laser and a camera to search for traces of life.

The robotic rover is designed to scoop up promising samples, load them into several dozen sterile tubes and cache them for eventual return to Earth, where they can be analyzed more thoroughly. Missions to collect those samples are planned for some time around 2028 or later, NASA officials said.

“The burden of proof for finding life on another planet is extremely high,” said mission project scientist Ken Farley at the California Institute of Technology. “We would like to get as many samples home as we can.”

The 2,200-pound Perseverance rover is the most complex all-terrain self-guided vehicle NASA has ever built, with 13 onboard computers, 23 cameras and seven onboard experiments wired together with 3 miles of cables, according to JPL Deputy Project Manager Jennifer Trosper. It can move about 220 yards a day at a top speed of one-tenth of a mile an hour—slowly to minimize the possibility of damage to the vehicle, but three times faster than any other rover on the planet.

Agency engineers hope to use its cameras to take high-definition video of the rover’s plummet to the planet’s surface in February—the first footage of a spacecraft landing on another planet. The rover also has two microphones to record and relay sounds for the first time, from the whoosh of its huge parachute unfurling to the crunch of its wheels rolling across Martian soil and the zap of its laser vaporizing rocks for chemical analysis.

“It is the first time we have taken this human sense to Mars,” said Deputy Project Manager Matthew Wallace at JPL. “We are hoping we will get some great audio.”

Once the craft is settled safely on Mars, NASA mission engineers will order it to unpack one of its most innovative experiments: a 4-pound helicopter drone. The drone will attempt several test flights, starting about six weeks after the landing. If successful, it will be the first time any vehicle has flown on another world.

“It is a little spacecraft in itself,” said Mimi Aung, project manager for the Ingenuity helicopter. “This is like a Wright Brothers test flight, but on another planet.”