About Nasa’s innovation to tap Mars Planet
NASA’s science rover Perseverance, the most advanced astrobiology laboratory ever sent to another world, streaked through the Martian atmosphere on Thursday and landed safely on the floor of a vast crater, its first stop on a search for traces of ancient microbial life on the Red Planet.
The rover will begin its search for traces of ancient microbial life on Mars.
It was a happy moment for everybody when the radio signals confirmed that the six-wheeled rover had survived its perilous descent and arrived within its target zone inside Jezero Crater, site of a long-vanished Martian lake bed.
About Nasa’s rover “Perseverance” and its Spaceflight
The robotic vehicle sailed through space for nearly seven months, covering 293 million miles (472 million km) before piercing the Martian atmosphere at 12,000 miles per hour (19,000 km per hour) to begin its approach to touchdown on the planet’s surface.
The spacecraft’s self-guided descent and landing during a complex series of manoeuvre. Nasa considers Perseverance as the most elaborate and challenging feat in the annals of robotic spaceflight.
Two subsequent Mars missions are planned to retrieve the samples and return them to NASA in the next decade.
“In this article the recent mission of NASA to put its latest rover, Perseverance, on Mars planet has been discussed and also how India’s age-old assumption of presence of alien life forms on Mars”.
About Nasa’s innovation to tap Mars Planet
NASA’s science rover Perseverance, the most advanced astrobiology laboratory ever sent to another world, streaked through the Martian atmosphere on Thursday and landed safely on the floor of a vast crater, its first stop on a search for traces of ancient microbial life on the Red Planet.
The rover will begin its search for traces of ancient microbial life on Mars.
It was a happy moment for everybody when the radio signals confirmed that the six-wheeled rover had survived its perilous descent and arrived within its target zone inside Jezero Crater, site of a long-vanished Martian lake bed.
About Nasa’s rover “Perseverance” and its Spaceflight
The robotic vehicle sailed through space for nearly seven months, covering 293 million miles (472 million km) before piercing the Martian atmosphere at 12,000 miles per hour (19,000 km per hour) to begin its approach to touchdown on the planet’s surface.
The spacecraft’s self-guided descent and landing during a complex series of manoeuvre. Nasa considers Perseverance as the most elaborate and challenging feat in the annals of robotic spaceflight.
Two subsequent Mars missions are planned to retrieve the samples and return them to NASA in the next decade.
“Last week, separate probes launched by the United Arab Emirates and China reached Martian orbit. NASA has three Mars satellites still in orbit, along with two from the European Space Agency”.
Expectations from Perseverance
- To find out the existence of the original conducive conditions for the microbial forms of life in the past some four billion years ago.
- To find out the complex factors that control the preservation potential of organic matter and other biosignatures.
- 4 billion to 3.5 billion year old side silicate rich terrain of Mars which shows evidence of sustained weathering of sediments with liquid water has been traced.
- The Perseverance rover is programmed to see carbonate rocks within the Jezerocrater (45 km wide, where it is assumed that an old lake existed), where the Pristine nature of the original biological and climatic signals is expected to be preserved better.
- Till this day the mechanisms of the formation of carbonates on Mars and whether they are comparable to those processes which are often related to oceanic settings.
If the search for evidence of life on Mars is successful it will prove that life is ubiquitous feature of the universe and that will be create a lot more opportunity will open its doors for humanity.
India’s Mars Orbiter Mission, Mangalyaan
India’s Mars Orbiter Mission, also called Mangalyaan has completed five years of orbiting the red planet. (Mangalyaan, “Mars-craft” in Sanskrit, is orbiting Mars since September 24, 2014. It was India’s first interplanetary journey to cross the Earth’s orbit successfully. The Mars mission from many countries are the expanded frontiers of science, but till date we have not found any Martians.
Mars has become the back-up planet now. It always captures the imagination of humankind including Indians that the this planet will serve as the place we will escape to when we have rendered Earth uninhabitable. No less than 10,932,295 people sent their names to Nasa to “join” the 2020 Perseverance mission, their names carried to the red planet on microchips. Over 5,500,000 have added their names for a future mission and gotten a “boarding pass”. More than 270,000 names are from India, the most after the Philippines and the US.
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It all probably started because of the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli. In 1877, he saw channel-like structures on the surface of Mars. His Italian canali, or channels, got translated as canals. In 1906, The New York Times Magazine ran a cover story about Percival Lowell, an amateur astronomer who said he had discovered nearly 500 canals irrigating oases all over the planet. This was the time, writes Nathaniel Rich in Believer magazine, when canals, like the Suez and Panama, “had come to represent the pinnacle of human achievement”. Newspapers claimed Martians had built two immense canals in two years while earthlings had taken half a century to dig the Suez and Panama. An astronomy professor was sure that once we got advanced telescopes, we would be able to see Martian cities.
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That canal fantasy so captivated us that Bengali writer Hemendra Kumar Roy fantasied in his novel, Meghduter Mortey Agomon, that Mars had green fields and jungles around 3,000- to 4,000-mile long canals while the rest of the planet was buffeted by red sandstorms. All that was debunked but, by then, the Martians had landed in our imagination.
4th March 2021 | UPSC GS Paper-3 | Editorial | Science and Technology |This article is based on “Persevering with our Martian Fantasies”.
published in The Hindu on 04/03/2021. In this article the importance of In this article the recent mission of NASA to put its latest rover, Perseverance, on Mars planet has been discussed and also how India’s age-old assumption of presence of alien life forms on Mars
