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This new and improved automobile sized Perserverance rover is supposed to join the loyal and hard-working Curiosity rover currently crawling around on Mars taking all those amazing photos. (Making bots a multiplanet species!) This rover will carry the little Mars Helicopter (called 'Ingenuity') to give us aerial camera shots. (I hope it works...) The rover and the helicopter have to be highly autonomous because the time delays of Earth-Mars communications make real-time remote-control impossible.

The launch will be lofted by a ULA Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station adjacent to the Kennedy Space Center. ULA has a dedicated launch pad there, constructed to fit its rockets.

The mission has to be launched in a particular window that happens roughly every two years, so that Earth and Mars are in the proper places in their orbits. (It isn't practical to launch rockets to Mars when they are on opposite sides of the Sun.) This current launch window runs from July 20 through August 11. If all goes well, the vehicle will arrive at Mars in February 2021.

The windows are technically called synods, and Elon Musk's science-fiction imagination imagines hundreds of Starships, waiting refueled in orbit, all lighting their engines together and departing for Mars in a huge Battlestar Galactica fleet carrying thousands of colonists and thousands of tons of supplies to the Mars colony every two years. That would be something to see, assuming it ever happens. (It's certain it will never happen if nobody tries...)

https://www.space.com/mars-perseverance-...-away.html

NASA/JPL image

Finally a rover that will earnestly test for life on Mars. Both the glaring lack of and the feeble attempts made over the last quarter century almost tempts conspiracy theories.

As if all the people directly involved in the design of the Viking program launched 45 years ago were so respected that they had to die out completely before dedicated biological experiments could be conducted again. As if a mission agenda like that having other than a bottom-feeder status was a football number that had been retired by an NFL team, an affront to revive it.

You could almost imagine goofy, excessive degrees of reverence transpiring along such lines in the coming decades as the para-religious Church of Woke devours government, society, and business. Erecting new, sacred idols and forbidding this and that on ideological grounds and sub-Marxist sensibilities.

The Mars 2020 Perseverance lander is scheduled to launch on Thursday July 30 at 7:50 AM EDT (4:50 AM PDT, I'll have to set my alarm). For you Brits, it's 11:50 UTC. It will be live-streamed on NASA TV/NASA Live starting at 7:00 AM EDT. They say that they plan a bunch of events on NASA TV/NASA Live leading up to the launch. Details below:

https://mars.nasa.gov/news/8716/nasa-to-...ctivities/

Besides having a large nuclear powered rover the size of a car, the lander will be a sight to behold if there was anyone on Mars to see it. It will enter the Martian atmosphere the conventional way with a heat shield. Then it will discard the heat shield and deploy parachutes. Except the Martian atmosphere is too thin to slow a lander sufficiently. So NASA proposes that the "lander" transform itself into a rocket-powered sky-crane that will hover on rocket exhaust and lower the Perseverance rover down to the Martian surface. (Then the sky-crane will fly safely away and be discarded.)

That crazy sci-fi plan elicits a 'Yeah, right. That's really gonna work' response, at least from me. Except that NASA's already successfully accomplished this kind of skycrane landing on Mars before, most recently with the Insight lander. Keep in mind that it will all be happening robotically and autonomously, since the Earth-Mars time delay makes remote control impossible.

The Mars 2020 Perseverance lander/rover and its ULA Atlas rocket just rolled out from its Vertical Integration Facility (VIF) to the pad at Cape Canaveral this morning. It was riding on a huge transporter that rolls on railroad tracks pushed by railroad locomotives. (ULA photographs)





About the Ingenuity Mars helicopter. It only weighs 4 pounds!

https://twitter.com/LockheedMartin/statu...3905338368

Mars 2020 Perserverance got off successfully this morning atop a ULA Atlas Centaur rocket. It's currently in a parking orbit above the Earth, awaiting its Mars trajectory injection burn.

(ULA photograph)



Edit: Mars trajectory injection burn underway.

Edit: Injection complete. Spacecraft separation. Acquisition of signal on NASA Deep Space Net. Perserverance is on its way to Mars.

The whole 2020 fleet of three vehicles is completed and on their way to Mars.

Perserverance is set to make its Mars landing attempt on February 18. That should come about 3 PM EST, 12 noon PST and 20:00 UTC. It's certain to be livestreamed by NASA.

Since Mars is light-minutes away they won't be able to control it in real-time. Its atmospheric entry and subsequent insane landing maneuvers will have to be autonomous and robotic. All the humans will get is verification that each step happened minutes after it did. It will be moments of terror for the controllers followed (hopefully) by moments of joy, as NASA attempts their absolutely ridiculous rocket-powered science-fiction sky-crane landing. (So many things can go wrong...)

The rover is as big as a car, nuclear powered and carries a helicopter.