Blogarchiv
Raumfahrt - Startvorbereitung und Start für NASA Mars Perseverance Rover 2020 Mission-Update-14

27.07.2020

Ready for Mars: Perseverance Counts Down to Thursday Launch

persevance

Artist’s concept of Perseverance’s seven-foot-long (2.1-meter), instrument-laden robotic arm at work on the surface of Jezero Crater, sometime after February 2021. Image Credit: NASA

Only four days now remain before NASA despatches its next robotic explorer to Mars. The long-awaited Perseverance rover—equipped with seven scientific instruments to sniff out the biosignatures of past life, assess the behavior of dust as part of efforts to better understand the Martian weather and test-fly a helicopter on another world for the first time—is scheduled to launch atop a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V booster during a two-hour “window” which opens at 7:50 a.m. EDT Thursday. Assuming an on-time launch, Perseverance will spend 203 days in space, before executing a hazardous Entry, Descent and Landing (EDL) on 18 February 2021 to alight in the geologically-rich Jezero Crater, just north of the Martian equator. It is expected that Perseverance will contribute substantially to build knowledge for future In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) on the Red Planet and gather a “cache” of soil and rock specimens which may be retrieved and returned to Earth on a future mission.

+++

Mission Live Updates

27Jul2020 10:32:43 Eastern
Weather looking food for Thursday's launch
The 45th Weather Squadron have released the weather forecast for the Mars Perseverance Atlas V launch.  This covers 3 consecutive days with the chances of acceptable weather looking great for all opportunities.

Launch Day is 80% Go with the main concerns being Cumulus Clouds and Thick Clouds.
screenshot-2020-07-27-at-152848-600x452
+++
perseverance-artwork
persevance-a
Quelle: AS
+++

Weather is good for NASA's Mars Perseverance launch on ULA's Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral

Less than a week to go until a spacecraft slated to head to Mars lifts off from Cape Canaveral and weather is looking good for launch.

As of Sunday, weather was 80% "go" as calculated by the U.S. Air Force for NASA's Mars Perseverance launch which is scheduled to lift off no earlier than 7:50 a.m. July 30. 

The spacecraft will launch atop United Launch Alliance's Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Launch Complex 41. 

Teams have until 9:50 a.m. to launch or will be forced to delay another day.

An artist's rendering of the new Mars Rover Perseverance, which is expected to reach the Red Planet in 2021.
NASA

The primary weather concern for Thursday's launch are isolated showers offshore and mid-level clouds along the coast, according to the 45th Space Wing. 

In the event of a delay, weather improves slightly to 90% "go" for a Friday launch. 

After liftoff, the Mars Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter will head on a six-month journey to the red planet where it will then attempt to search for past and present signs of extraterrestrial life on the Martian surface.

Perseverance's mission marks the first leg of a sample return mission on Mars. If successful, Perseverance will collect and cache Martian rock samples for a future Mars lander to retrieve and return to Earth.

The mission will also be the first time a helicopter flies on Mars.

"It's not easy to build a rotorcraft to fly on Mars. The atmosphere is really thin. I mean compared to Earth, it's about 1%. So a vehicle to fly on Mars has to be really light and it has to spin really fast," said MiMi Aung, Ingenuity helicopter project manager at NASA's JPL during a media teleconference. 

In total, the mission is expected to last approximately ten years from the time Perseverance lifts off to when the samples are returned to Earth. 

Quelle: Florida Today

+++

NASA's Perseverance rover to return Martian meteorites to Mars

July 27, 2020

— NASA is poised to launch its first Mars sample return mission, though not in the traditional sense of the term.

The U.S. space agency is preparing to send its next rover to the red planet with the tools needed to collect and cache samples for their later return to Earth by a future spacecraft. The samples may help answer if ancient life existed on Mars.

NASA describes the Perseverance rover as "the first leg of a round trip to Mars," but the six-wheeled vehicle is already equipped with everything it needs to carry out the first "Mars sample return," even before reaching Mars.

Perseverance is carrying pieces of Mars that were delivered naturally to Earth. Two small slices of Martian meteorites are on board.

"We figured this was a nice way of doing the sample return," said Luther Beegle, the principal investigator for the SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals) science instrument on the rover.

Perseverance is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on July 30, and land in Jezero Crater on Mars on Feb. 18, 2021.

Self calibrating

Perseverance's Martian meteorites are more than just hitchhikers that have found a ride home. They will play a role in fine tuning the rover's search for life.

Mounted at the end of the rover's robotic arm, SHERLOC uses a combination of a laser, a camera (called WATSON, or Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering) and spectrometers to identify organics and minerals that have been altered by water, pointing to possible evidence for past Martian microbial organisms.

To ensure that the measurements that SHERLOC takes are accurate, its precision instruments need to be periodically calibrated, especially given where the readings are being taken.

"This is a very inhospitable environment. It has temperature swings. It has dust. It has UV [ultraviolet] radiation on the surface," Beegle told collectSPACE in an interview. "So what you have to do — and you have to do this in a laboratory [on Earth], too — is you have to calibrate your instrument so that what you determine you're looking at is really what you're looking at."

As such, Perseverance also carries a SHERLOC calibration target, a device about the size of a large smartphone that has 10 different material samples. The team operating SHERLOC will point the instruments at the "cal target" once every three to five months to check that the wavelengths and spacial scales they measure on Mars match the known properties of the Earth-sourced examples.

"We listed the things we had to measure and then we figured out how measure them. That's where the calibration target came from," said Beegle.

One of the SHERLOC targets is the Martian meteorite slice, which will be used to determine how well the mapping spectrometer's scanning mirror is working.

"We decided to put a natural sample [on the target] and then somebody came up with a great idea, 'Hey, let's make it a Martian meteorite, right?'" Beegle recalled. "We can return a sample back to Mars because Perseverance is the first stage of sample return."

"Perseverance will be collecting samples that are 5 centimeters by 1 centimeter [2 by 0.4 inches], putting them in tubes, sealing them and then a future rover is going to come pick them up and bring them back to Earth," he said.

Another of Perseverance's instruments, its mast-mounted SuperCam, also has a Martian meteorite on its calibration device as a practice target and as an "inverse sample return."

Long-term loan

Technically, Perseverance is the second Mars mission to bring a Martian meteorite back to the planet. NASA's Mars Global Surveyor, which operated from 1997 to 2007, still carries an Earth-sourced piece of Mars — but as an orbiter, circles high above the surface.

Perseverance's meteorites will be the first to complete the full round trip.

"A lot of why we came up with we did was because one of our co-investigators was a gentleman named Mark Fries. He worked at Johnson Space Center," said Beegle, who works at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Fries works in the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science division at Johnson, the Houston office that is responsible for curating NASA's collection of extraterrestrial materials, including Apollo-recovered moon rocks, interplanetary dust samples and meteorites.

"So we went in to try to find a piece of Mars that we could use and we ended up contacting the Natural History Museum in London, which had an extra sample of material that they loaned us," Beegle told collectSPACE.

The museum provided a sample known as Sayh al Uhamiyr 008 (SaU 008), which was found in Oman in 1999 and has been in its care since 2000.

"The piece that we are sending was specifically chosen because it is the right material in terms of chemistry, but also it is a very tough rock," Caroline Smith, principal curator of meteorites at the Natural History Museum, said in a statement. "Some of the Martian meteorites we have are very fragile. This meteorite is as tough as old boots."

"In addition, studying this sample over the course of the mission will help us to understand the chemical interactions between the Martian surface and its atmosphere," she said.

The sample originally left Mars between 600 and 700 thousand years ago, making its journey aboard Perseverance a very long-awaited homecoming. It will also be a unique occurrence for the museum, said Smith.

"Every year, we provide hundreds of meteorite specimens to scientists all over the world to study," said Smith. "But this is a first for us: sending one of our samples approximately 100 million kilometers [62 million miles] away back home, to further our knowledge of Mars."

And though it is technically a loan, Beegle does not think the museum is expecting to get the meteorite back.

"If they want it back, we'll see what we can do," he said, laughing. "But I would not be holding my breath."

 
01-5

A Martian meteorite (inset) is part of the calibration target for the SHERLOC science instrument that is mounted to the front of NASA's Perseverance rover. The mission will search for evidence of ancient microbial life on Mars. (NASA/JPL / collectSPACE)


02-6

A slice of a meteorite scientists have determined came from Mars. A similar slice is being returned to Mars on NASA's Perseverance rover as part of the SHERLOC calibration target. (NASA/JPL)


03-6

Discovered in Oman in 1999, the Sayh al Uhamiyr 008 (SaU 008) meteorite was blasted off Mars 600,000 to 700,000 years ago. A slice from the meteorite is now returning to the red planet aboard NASA's Perseverance rover. (Natural History Museum, London)


04-5

An engineering model of SHERLOC, one the instruments onboard NASA's Perseverance rover. Located on the end of the rover's robotic arm, SHERLOC will help determine which samples to take so that they can be sealed in tubes and left on the Martian surface for future return to Earth. (NASA/JPL)


05-5

Artist's concept of the SHERLOC instrument (circled) located on the end of the robotic arm of NASA's Perseverance Mars rover. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Quelle: CS 
----
Update: 29.07.2020
.

NASA Mars rover completes preflight checks ahead of this week’s launch

perseverence-ingenuity-nasa

NASA’s Perseverance rover headed for Mars this week officially cleared all required Flight Readiness Reviews, pushing the mission one step closer to its launch pad rollout and liftoff. Launch provider ULA (United Launch Alliance) announced the milestone earlier today.

“The Launch Readiness Review (LRR) has given the approval to continue preparations for Thursday’s liftoff of the United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket carrying NASA’s Mars 2020 mission,” ULA’s official mission page stated. “Leadership from ULA, NASA and the Space Force assessed the readiness of the rocket, payload and mission assets, discussed the status of pre-flight processing work, heard technical overviews of the countdown and flight, and previewed the weather forecast that continues to be favorable with an 80 percent chance of acceptable conditions. At the conclusion of the meeting, senior leaders were polled and gave a unanimous ready status for launch, then signed the Launch Readiness Certificate.”

NASA followed with two separate live-streamed conferences in an effort to both inform and engage the public about the mission’s details and goals. During the first pre-launch event, key executives for the mission expressed their pride in the Perseverance rover team while making particular note of the challenging circumstances faced during the COVID-19 pandemic. “Every day was taking the kids to work day,” mused Omar Baez, NASA’s Senior Launch Director.

Keeping the 2020 Mars rover mission on schedule has been vitally important compared to other launches due to the timing involved with the seven-month journey to the red planet. “We have a 20 day planetary launch window, and if we miss it, we’re pushing out another couple of years,” explained Matt Wallace, Perseverance’s Deputy Project Manager, during the first conference. NASA’s second conference of the day focused on the engineering details behind the rover’s instruments to fulfill its three primary missions of seeking signs of life, collecting/caching samples, and testing future technologies.

The 2020 rover has many unique instruments that make it stand out from NASA’s other rovers and landers currently residing on Mars. As part of making the search for ancient microbial life its mission priority, Perseverance has a large robotic arm with a multi-bit drill attached for gathering and storing scientifically interesting samples. These specimens will later be brought to Earth as part of a “sample return” mission.

NASA’s newest Mars rover will additionally have two technology tests aboard – one that generates oxygen from the planet’s carbon dioxide atmosphere, the other a small helicopter for gathering aerial data, and enabling more widespread travel possibilities. Perhaps most relatable to many humans’ day-to-day, however, is Perseverance’s “selfie” capabilities. Not just limited to snaps surrounded by regolith and red mountains, once descent and landing begin from Martian orbit, the rover’s numerous cameras will capture the entire event on video and send the footage back to NASA’s team and the public alike.

Perseverance will accomplish its tasks using power provided by a plutonium-238 nuclear energy source with a 14-year lifespan. As the isotope decays, heat is generated and converted into electricity to charge the rover’s batteries. This part of the mission was activated and loaded with Perseveranceinto its ULA Atlas V rocket last week.

NASA plans the mission’s launch pad rollout tomorrow with an early morning liftoff on Thursday, July 30th.

Quelle: TESLARATI

----

Update: 30.07.2020

.

Erfolgreicher Start von NASA Mars Rover 2020 Mission

atlasv-mars2020-a

2020-nasa-mars2020-a

2020-nasa-mars2020-aa

2020-nasa-mars2020-ab

2020-nasa-mars2020-ac

2020-nasa-mars2020-ad

2020-nasa-mars2020-ae

2020-nasa-mars2020-af

2020-nasa-mars2020-ag

2020-nasa-mars2020-aga

2020-nasa-mars2020-ah

2020-nasa-mars2020-aha

2020-nasa-mars2020-ai

2020-nasa-mars2020-aj

2020-nasa-mars2020-ak

2020-nasa-mars2020-al

2020-nasa-mars2020-am

2020-nasa-mars2020-an

2020-nasa-mars2020-ao

2020-nasa-mars2020-ap

2020-nasa-mars2020-aq

2020-nasa-mars2020-ar

2020-nasa-mars2020-as

2020-nasa-mars2020-at

2020-nasa-mars2020-au

2020-nasa-mars2020-av

2020-nasa-mars2020-ava

2020-nasa-mars2020-avb

2020-nasa-mars2020-aw

2020-nasa-mars2020-ax

2020-nasa-mars2020-ay

2020-nasa-mars2020-az

2020-nasa-mars2020-aza

2020-nasa-mars2020-azb

2020-nasa-mars2020-azc

2020-nasa-mars2020-azd

2020-nasa-mars2020-aze

2020-nasa-mars2020-azf

2020-nasa-mars2020-azg

2020-nasa-mars2020-azh

2020-nasa-mars2020-azi

2020-nasa-mars2020-azj

2020-nasa-mars2020-azk

2020-nasa-mars2020-azl

2020-nasa-mars2020-azm

2020-nasa-mars2020-azn

2020-nasa-mars2020-azo

2020-nasa-mars2020-azp

2020-nasa-mars2020-azq

2020-nasa-mars2020-azr

2020-nasa-mars2020-b

2020-nasa-mars2020-azs

2020-nasa-mars2020-azt

2020-nasa-mars2020-azu

Quelle: ULA

+++

United Launch Alliance Atlas V Successfully Launches Mars 2020 Mission for NASA 

Launch Marks ULA’s 20th Mission to the Red Planet
Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., (July 30, 2020) – A United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket carrying the Mars 2020 mission with the Perseverance rover for NASA, lifted off from Space Launch Complex-41 on July 30 at 7:50 a.m. EDT.

ULA and its heritage rockets have launched every U.S. led mission to Mars, beginning in the 1960s. The launch of this mission marks ULA’s 20th trip to the red planet and the 85thsuccessful launch of an Atlas V rocket. The Atlas V has previously launched four missions to Mars, including the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2005, the Curiosity rover in 2011, the MAVEN orbiter in 2013 and the InSight lander in 2018.

“Thank you to the ULA team and our NASA mission partners for diligently working through an ever-changing environment to successfully launch this historic mission,” said Gary Wentz, ULA vice president of Government and Commercial Programs. “The complexity of the Mars 2020 mission proves ULA’s acceptance of the most challenging launch requirements and we work together with NASA to achieve them. Our guidance accuracy for interplanetary missions is unmatched, and the Atlas V is the only vehicle certified to launch payloads with nuclear power sources.”

One of the most powerful rockets in the Atlas V fleet, the 541 configuration, with four solid rocket boosters, provides optimum performance to precisely deliver a range of mission types. In addition to three national security and two weather satellites, an
Atlas V 541 rocket launched NASA’s Curiosity rover on its 10-month, 354 million-mile journey to the surface of Mars.

This Atlas V 541 configuration vehicle included a 5-meter payload fairing (PLF) and stood at 197 ft. tall. The Atlas booster for this mission was powered by the RD AMROSS RD-180 engine. Aerojet Rocketdyne provided the four AJ-60A SRBs and RL10C-1 engine for the Centaur upper stage.

NASA's Launch Services Program (LSP) at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida selected United Launch Alliance’s (ULA’s) proven Atlas V vehicle for this mission and is responsible for management and oversight of the Atlas V launch services. LSP selected this rocket because it has the right liftoff capability for the "heavy weight" requirements for NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover launch.

To date ULA has launched 140 times with 100 percent mission success.

With more than a century of combined heritage, ULA is the world’s most experienced and reliable launch service provider. ULA has successfully launched more than 135 missions to orbit that provide Earth observation capabilities, enable global communications, unlock the mysteries of our solar system, and support life-saving technology.

Quelle: ULA

+++

21.45 MESZ:

Trägerrakete mit Marsrover hat technische Probleme

Im Erdschatten könnte ein Teil des Raumschiffs zu kalt geworden sein, teilt die Nasa mit. Die Temperaturen hätten sich jedoch inzwischen normalisiert.
Quelle: NASA
----
Update: 19.08.2020
.

NASA to perform independent review of Mars sample return plans

mars2020-1

 

WASHINGTON — NASA will carry out an independent review of its overall efforts to return samples from Mars, seeking to find any potential issues with the campaign while still in its earliest stages of development.

NASA announced Aug. 14 it will establish a Mars Sample Return Independent Review Board to examine the agency’s current plans to return samples from Mars, which started with the Mars 2020 mission launched July 30. The board will be chaired by David Thompson, the former president of Orbital ATK who retired shortly after his company was acquired by Northrop Grumman in 2018.

“This review will give us the chance to focus on overall mission success and to consider potential improvements that can be made early in the program to help ensure that outcome,” Thompson said in a NASA statement.

Jeff Gramling, Mars Sample Return program director at NASA Headquarters, said at an Aug. 17 meeting of NASA’s Planetary Science Advisory Committee that Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, requested the independent review based on the experience with similar reviews of other programs, including what is now known as the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. That mission, previously known as the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope, went through a similar review in 2017 when it was facing cost overruns.

“The goals of the review are to make sure we’re on a firm foundation technically going forward, to review the concepts that have been developed to date, and also to look at the cost and schedule that we’re proposing and to make sure that they agree that we’ve got the right resources we need to do this job,” Gramling said.

The independent review is scheduled to last eight weeks, with preliminary results briefed to NASA after six weeks. Gramling said that, in addition to the independent review board, The Aerospace Corporation is performing a cost and schedule review for Mars Sample Return. Both reviews will support a mission concept review for the program, which was moved from early August to mid-October so it can incorporate the results of the independent reviews.

In his presentation to the committee, Gramling didn’t suggest any major changes were pending to the Mars Sample Return campaign. The Perseverance rover that Mars 2020 will deliver to the surface of Mars next February will cache samples of Martian rocks. A lander mission, scheduled for launch in 2026, will collect those samples, load them into a canister and launch it into Martian orbit. An Earth Return Orbiter, also launched in 2026, will grab the canister and return it to Earth, landing in the Utah desert in 2031.

The overall Mars Sample Return effort will likely cost more than $7 billion between NASA and the European Space Agency, which is partnering on the campaign. Mars 2020 cost $2.4 billion to build, plus $300 million for its first Martian year of operations. At a July 28 press conference, David Parker, director of human and robotic exploration at ESA, estimated that the Earth Return Orbiter that ESA will develop, along with a small “fetch” rover for the NASA-led lander, will cost 1.5 billion euros ($1.8 billion) over the next decade. Zurbuchen, at the same briefing, offered a “first guess” for the cost of NASA’s role in those future missions at $2.5–3 billion.

That could make Mars Sample Return the most expensive set of Mars missions to date. NASA’s twin Viking missions, which each had an orbiter and lander, cost an estimated $7.1 billion in 2020 dollars, according to an analysis by The Planetary Society.

That’s added to the pressure to better understand the true cost of the campaign of missions as soon as possible. Gramling referred to lessons learned from the development of the Curiosity rover mission, which “suggested we really get our arms around cost and schedule estimates early.”

“The primary objectives are to make sure we’re on a good footing going forward and that we have the resources we need to execute the mission and be successful,” he said.

Quelle: SN

 

3113 Views
Raumfahrt+Astronomie-Blog von CENAP 0