The Perseverance apparatus has landed on Mars in February 2021. Since the landing has not passed and the month has not passed, and the mercier has already begun to fulfill its main task - the collection of Martian soil. The collected materials will be stored in a special compartment of the Marshode until a different apparatus arrives after a few years and does not take them to land for studying in laboratory conditions. Scientists hope that in the extracted Martian soil they will get to find traces of life, which could exist on Mars millions of years ago. Over the past month, we wrote a lot about the design and goals of the Marshode, but today we will talk about something new - the Supercam toolbox has built into it. This is the most important element of the Perseverance apparatus and it is designed to collect most of the red planet information. Once, one of the devices broke and had to be repaired in a very short time. It turned out that the breakdown went to him ...
Perseverance began work on Mars
The beginning of the work of the Perseverance market was reported Scientific Edition of Science Alert. According to the employee of the NASA Scientific Missions of Thomas Zurbuchen, the main part of the Mars sent to the Mars is a set of SuperCam tools. It is located on the middle of the mast design and consists of spectrometers, a laser, devices for recording sounds and studying the chemical composition of the Martian soil. In size, the toolkit is comparable to a shoe box.
The design of the Marshode Perseverance
The spectrometer is called an optical device that can intensity of different radiation. The function of the sound recording is already clear to you - February 22, NASA has published the sounds of Mars, which were recorded by a rover. And instruments for the study of Martian soil, respectively, can explore the composition of the surface of Mars. Special attention is worthy of Supercam laser, which can affect objects less than the tip of the pencil. It is necessary to cleanse the surface of objects from dust and other garbage, which interfere with the rover to conduct research.
Mars sounds recorded by Perseverance
The leaders of the Perseverance mission shared that four months before the launch of the Marshode laser was randomly broken. A team of 500 engineers was engaged in the repair - the device had to be collected from almost scratch. During the assembly of the laser, it turned out that it was originally the so-called "Hubblovsky defect". After launching the Hubble telescope in 1990, researchers found that in the main mirror of the observatory there are aberration. This is the name of the error in the optical system, due to which the rays are incorrectly refracted and worsen image quality. In the equipment of the Marshode, this problem was also also, due to the breakdown of the laser, it was possible to fix it.
See also: A large interview with the creator of the Perseverance Marshode
Ingenuity helicopter for studying Mars
In addition to the Supercam toolkit, the Perseverance rover is equipped with a 2-meter robotic hand, several cameras and other devices. At the bottom of the device is hidden by a small helicopter ingenuity, which should take for the first time between April 19 and May 19, 2021. The experimental aircraft weighs 1.8 kilograms, works on solar energy and is able to fly for 90 seconds at a time. First of all, scientists want to find out whether such devices can fly in general to Martian air. If yes, in the future, the helicopter will be used for exploration of hard-to-reach territories and building a route for the Marshode.
The rover and helicopter are in the crater of the drier, which has long been interested in scientists because there was once a long time in it. Based on this, the chance that scientists will manage to find traces of ancient organisms, increases many times. It is believed that the mission of the Perseverance Marshode will last for about two years, but it is possible that it will work much longer.
Links to interesting articles, funny memes and many other interesting information can be found on our telegram channel. Sign up!
It is important to note that soon another apparatus will land on Mars - the Chinese Marshod "Tianwean-1". The descent will be performed on the plain utopia, the diameter of which is approximately 3300 kilometers. This is a relatively flat place that was formed after the fall of a large object. More about what looks like and what is needed by the Marshod "Tianwean-1", I told in this material. Also in this article I told than the plain utopia so much interests scientists. Enjoy reading!