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
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