Aviation Week reports that NASA is “reaching out to the private sector for assistance with the Artemis program, this time to provide unpressurized lunar terrain vehicles (LTVs) to enhance astronaut exploration or to robotically transport cargo and prospect for resources when humans are not available.”
Full Story (Aviation Week)
Tag: Mars rover
NASA’s Perseverance Rover Begins Science Mission On Mars
The Daily Mail (UK) reports that NASA’s Perseverance rover has commenced its science mission on Mars, starting with a move away from its touchdown zone June 1. As part of its science mission, the rover will search “for signs of ancient microscopic life,” and study the Jezero Crater’s “geology and look for signs of past habitability.” The rover also will “collect rock and sediment samples, which the US space agency hopes to bring back to Earth with a future mission for further study.”
Full Story (Daily Mail)
NASA’s Perseverance Rover to Land on Mars Thursday
Florida Today reports that NASA has scheduled the landing of its Mars Perseverance Rover on Mars’ Jezero Crater for 3:55 p.m. EST Thursday. During what is “known as the ‘Seven Minutes of Terror,’ Perseverance will enter the Martian atmosphere, shed its head shield, deploy parachute, slow to a speed of 1.7 miles per hour, drop out of its capsule, fire rockets on its sky crane, and lower to the ground.”
Full Story (Florida Today)
Scientists Using Perseverance Rover to Study Mysterious Green Rock Found on Mars
SPACE reported that NASA’s Perseverance rover’s SuperCam laser is studying a green rock that the rover discovered on the Red Planet. The laser works by creating “a cloud of vaporized rock, the composition of which can be analyzed by SuperCam’s cameras and spectrometers.” Scientists “hope that over time, the laser will give us more information about the strange rock’s composition, which could tell scientists whether it formed in place or was transported there by some process. If it didn’t form at its current location, water may have carried it to Jezero Crater or it could be a meteorite like the one that the Curiosity rover spotted in 2014.”
Full Story (SPACE)
Perseverance’s MOXIE Instrument Converts Martian Carbon Dioxide Into Oxygen for First Time
SPACE reports that on Tuesday, the Perseverance rover used its Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) instrument “to generate oxygen from the thin, carbon dioxide-dominated Martian atmosphere for the first time, demonstrating technology that could both help astronauts breathe and help propel the rockets that get them back home to Earth.” MOXIE “produces oxygen from carbon dioxide, expelling carbon monoxide as a waste product. The conversion process occurs at temperatures around 1,470 degrees Fahrenheit (800 degrees Celsius), so MOXIE is made of heat-tolerant materials and features a thin gold coating to keep potentially damaging heat from radiating outward into Perseverance’s body.” The MOXIE “team warmed the instrument up for two hours yesterday, then had it crank out oxygen for an hour.”
Full Story (SPACE)