Mars Perseverance Rover & Ingenuity Making Significant Scientific Impact. 2 Years on Mars!

this video celebrates an important birthday but not of a person instead it's a happy birthday to two machines making history on another planet that includes collecting the first Martian Rock samples humans will ever touch our first time being able to analyze Mars's atmosphere back here on Earth and flying the first helicopter on another world and these are just three of the major accomplishments by the perseverance Rover and Ingenuity helicopter during their first two years on the red planet what else has this amazing science Duo done and what's still to come for this pair that was only supposed to operate for two years that's coming up [Music] the Mars 2020 Rover later named perseverance or Percy for short launched on an atlas V rocket on July 30th 2020 arriving at Mars on February 18 2021 the pair survived what NASA calls the seven minutes of Terror as it Blaze through the Martian atmosphere and eventually used parachutes and a sky crane system to touch down safely on the red planet its Landing site jezero crater scientists believe the area was once flooded with water and was home to an ancient river Delta more than three and a half billion years ago River channels spilled over the crater wall and created a lake now scientists see evidence that water carried clay to the area but even more importantly during one of those wet periods it's possible that microbial life may have lived on Mars the Rover has now spent just over one Martian or two Earth years maneuvering through the crater its most recent role has been acting as a hunter-gatherer so to speak of Mars rocks now while Percy doesn't have the ability to send samples back to Earth it's actually collecting ones that will be picked up by another mission scheduled to launch in the next five years so far perseverance has collected 18 different samples that includes different types of rocks soil and even getting a taste of the Martian atmosphere so to speak that will finally help answer the question of what does Mars really smell like okay maybe not but it will at least tell us even more about the Martian atmosphere especially before we start sending humans to Mars the samples were collected inside titanium tubes in and around an area known as Three Forks eight samples are kept on board the Rover with the ultimate goal of a robotic handoff meaning once the Mars sample return Mission lands Percy will hand off the sample tubes to the Lander that will then be packed inside an ascent and returned vehicle as for the other 10 well the Rover kind of dropped them but don't worry it was planned though those are the backup tubes if for some reason they can't grab the samples from perseverance or they feel the drop tubes might have even more scientific value than originally thought a helicopter will fly over to the drop samples pick them up and then bring it back to the sample return vehicle with the goal of getting them in the hands of scientists on Earth by 2033 speaking of helicopters this Mission saw the first ever powered flight on another planet with the Ingenuity helicopter the little Chopper that could has blown past all expectations originally designed to fly only five times as of this video it has now flown 41 times racking up over an hour in flight time and traveling around 8 000 meters that's the equivalent of flying the width of 116 Boeing 747s wingtip to wingtip it even got a major software upgrade back in November besides getting three free months of virus protection oh oh no wait wrong kind of update but it now can use Hazard avoidance to assist with landing and use elevation maps to help the chopper navigate itself mid-flight to find flat Landing areas these flight tests are going to be very important when designing the helicopter that can pick up those Martian samples in just a few years and oddly enough it will also help with science on one of Saturn's moons the lessons learned from Ingenuity are already going into the design of dragonfly and no not seeing a SpaceX dragonfly dragonfly is an upcoming quadcopter scientific research mission to Saturn's moon Titan this will allow the science lab to fly instead of drive to different science targets and those aren't the only major accomplishments so far using microphones kinda similar to what I'm wearing perseverance became the first Rover to intentionally capture the sounds of Mars they recorded hours of Martian wind gusts [Music] Rover Wheels crunching [Music] odors worrying while using the robotic arm so far they've made two big realizations first it turns out the speed of sound is actually slower on Mars the second observation Mars is quiet very quiet at one point researchers say it was so silent they thought the two microphones were actually broken Percy also caught a really unique view this is what a solar eclipse looks like from Mars however it's not our moon causing the eclipse that's Phobos one of the planet's Two Moons and while it's not the first one ever caught on camera from Mars it is the most zoomed in and captured at the highest frame rate of any other Martian solar eclipse video both missions are now already past their original lifespan with perseverance originally designed for a two-year Mission and Ingenuity designed for only five flights so what does their extended Mission look like well the start of it is going to be an uphill battle literally the next stop for the pair is the site of an ancient river Delta which could answer questions about past life on Mars it's called the Delta top campaign as they climb to the well top of the former River delta I know clever name according to scientists at the jet propulsion laboratory the goal is to look beyond the walls of jezero crater in fact they expect to find rocks that weren't originally in or even close to the crater but were eroded away and then washed into it from miles away by flowing water so while scientists believe Percy has been riding through the lake bed up to this point they're now trying to study its origin aka the mouth of the River or the Delta top Ingenuity will also be continuing to do some important work and not just flight testing it will continue its main mission which is to look at possible sites for perseverance to go and explore from the air meanwhile with that newly upgraded software scientists hope that Ingenuity can fly over this Delta area and most importantly land safely afterwards researchers expect it to be very bumpy Rocky and uneven so landing on a flat surface as opposed to being impaled by a rock or getting flipped and stuck like a turtle is a high priority and keep in mind this is just the start of perseverance and ingenuities next phases curiosity a very similar Rover to perseverance landed back in August 2012 and it's still going pretty strong 11 years later this Rover also won't face the same issues as spirit and opportunity did as this Rover is nuclear power not solar however Ingenuity does run on the sun and has actually been slowing down its flight rate during the Martian winter to help save up its battery but there's still many more flights planned in the very near future so don't worry so what do you think we'll learn from perseverance and Ingenuity and what are you hoping they find on the red planet let us know in the comments down below and if you're excited about Mars why not check out our destination known merch at shop.nasaspaceflight.com as we get closer and closer to sending humans to Mars Starship could very well be the vehicle that carries the first people to step foot on the red planet it's even marked on the design as one of the two destinations along with the moon again that's available at shop.nasaspaceflight.com while the Curiosity Rover actually sang Happy Birthday to itself on Mars on its landiversary Percy isn't expected to sing but we here at NASA space flight wish the two spacecraft a happy birthday and here's to so much more science in the years to come I'm sorry Rosenstein later nerds

Channel: NASASpaceflight

Views: 36,428

Keywords: Mars 2020, Perseverance, Ingenuity, helicopter, rover, Martian rock samples, Jezero Crater, Mars Sample Return, Ingenuity flight tests, Dragonfly, Martian sounds, solar eclipse, ancient river delta, Atlas V, Rocket Launch, Mars, Humans on Mars, Human Spaceflight

Id: 4k4mnJDLkkE

Length: 9min 44sec (584 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 15 2023