Dear MEL Topic Readers,
The long
road to returning first-ever samples from Mars
Is it worth
spending billions of dollars to collect dirt samples from Mars’s surface and
bring them back to Earth? It seems so. Since Mars has no tectonic or volcanic
activities, not to mention the meteorological or aquatic influences like Earth,
things and traces of potential lives once might have existed on the surface billions
of years ago are expected to be preserved. So, NASA recently launched a rocket
to send Perseverance rover to Mars to collect samples on an ancient lade bed
and river delta, where lives might have existed three to four billion years
ago. Five years after Perseverance’s landing on Mars, NASA and European Space
Agency will cooperatively launch the Mars Ascent Vehicle lander and rocket to
fetch the samples. It seems like a very complicated and nail-biting mission. First,
the samples collected by Perseverance will be transferred to the ascent vehicle.
Then, the vehicle will be launched to rendezvous with an ESA spacecraft
orbiting Mars in 2028. Once the ESA orbiter catches the samples, it will head
back toward Earth and pass the samples to an entry vehicle that will be orbiting
Earth. The sample containers will finally land on Earth in 2031. And that’s not
the end. Some of the samples will be preserved for scores of years to be better
analyzed in the future when more advanced analysis will be made. What a
long-scope project it is!
Enjoy
reading the article and learn a mission that is cooperated by many and in the
future.
No comments:
Post a Comment