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“It’s a difficult endeavour,” says Wallace. “It’s a very aggressive, high-risk-high-reward experiment. We’re looking forward to getting it there and seeing it fly.”
Seeing is Perseverance’s forte. In addition to mounting 19 cameras on various parts of the rover, NASA has added cameras to the sky crane, a powered descent vehicle that will, after being slowed down by a massive parachute, lower the rover to the ground on a cable before flying away.
“For the first time, we’re going to have high-definition video of a spacecraft landing on another planet,” says Wallace. “We’re going to have some really exciting imagery.”
One of Perseverance’s final tricks will be years in the making. The rover has the capability to collect and store up to 40 rock and soil samples that can be returned to Earth on a future mission.
“That’s really the point of the sample return,” says Wallace. “Making a claim that there was once ancient life on a planet other than the Earth is a fairly profound statement, and it requires a pretty high bar when it comes to proof. And the community has come to the conclusion that it can’t get to that level of understanding without bringing the full power of terrestrial scientific elements to bear on samples. The signatures are just too faint and varied to do that with the limited set of instrumentation that you can take to the surface.”
To that end, the rover will collect its samples and leave them on the surface for a so-called “fetch rover,” currently in development, to collect later this decade.
Or, says Wallace, “if the rover stays healthy, one option is to have our vehicle take it to the next lander and drop off the samples right there. The lander will put them into what’s called a Mars Ascent Vehicle, which is a small rocket, and put them up into orbit around Mars, and then an orbiter would rendezvous with the samples in orbit and collect those and bring them back to the Earth.”
If Perseverance is a late-model automobile, consider that the ultimate in curbside pickup.
