What The Perseverance Rover Found Two Months Later On Mars

humanity has been watching mars since galileo first saw the red planet through a telescope in 1609. did mars once have life the answer to that question might be hiding somewhere in a place called jezero crater and now nasa's new perseverance rover has landed in this crater and it's beginning its mission to look for ancient signs of life which may have existed there long ago what is this new advanced mars rover scene and found so far [Applause] nasa's mars exploration programme has now put five robotic rovers on the surface of mars since july the 4th 1997 and on july the 30th 2020 perseverance was launched into space sitting atop a united launch alliance atlas 5 rocket the centerpiece of nasa's 2.7 billion dollar mars 2020 mission the perseverance rover was headed towards mars at nearly 25 000 miles per hour when it finally arrived at mars the world would witness something it's never seen before perseverance landed on the red planet and aced its seven minutes of terror touchdown on february 18th 2021 it's called this because it takes 11 minutes to get a radio signal back from mars and by the time the team learned that the spacecraft has entered the atmosphere the rover would already be on the ground leaving no time to fix sudden problems however this landing was also significant because it was the first time a rover landing on another planet was captured on video including the incredible sky crane maneuver the rocket-powered jet pack seen in the descent stage fired up its thrusters 7000 feet above the surface and lowered the rover gently down onto the surface by cables it was a major achievement for nasa its target landing site the jezero crater scientists believe jezero crater could be the place to find signs of past ancient life because 3.5 billion years ago jezreel was a place with a massive lake and its own river delta and even though the water is long gone there could still be bio signatures waiting to be discovered the next day the perseverance rover sent back some amazing high-res images including a photo of one of its wheels using one of the on-board color hazard cameras and another one using one of its mast cameras after landing cameras underneath the rover snapped the very first high resolution color image ever to be sent back to earth it also snapped an image of this very peculiar looking rock on march 28 2021 and also zapped the rock a few times with a laser so scientists can figure out what it's made of however perseverance is just getting started and it has a little surprise that was hiding under its hood ingenuity is a small robotic helicopter that was attached to the underside of the rover perseverance dropped off the four pound 80 million dollar helicopter on the martian soil april 4th 2021 the ingenuity helicopter doesn't carry scientific instruments but it does have a high resolution color camera that it uses to document its flights with and a black and white navigation camera nasa wants to test fly it five times in 31 days on april 6 perseverance sent back this image taken by its mastcam zed of the helicopter sitting on the martian surface and as it got farther away snapped a selfie of itself and the helicopter waiting just yards away so far ingenuity has survived the harsh conditions and freezing negative 130 degree fahrenheit mars nights engineers then unlocked the helicopters blades and tried to test them at low speed while perseverance shot this video of the helicopter's carbon blade spinning it looked like nasa was getting ready for humanity's very first flight on another planet however there have been problems with ingenuity getting off the martian soil on april the 9th the ingenuity helicopter attempted to test its blades at full speed but there was an unexpected failure of the craft's rotors and the test was aborted the problem a watchdog timer that monitors the status of the craft had expired while it was trying to transition the flight computer from pre-flight to flight mode however the helicopter was communicating that it was safe and healthy but the glitch in the software has the ingenuity team making a minor modification and reinstalling the software on board the craft [Music] but perseverance won't stay around for long it will be making its way to a few different locations where it will grab some rock and soil samples and cash them all in one spot so they can be collected nasa and the european space agency have an ambitious and expensive plan to build and send a pair of spacecraft to mars to pick up those samples and bring them back to earth which they say could happen within 10 years even the curiosity rover is still out there going strong and also collecting samples and will stash those in the same place in fact the curiosity rover took its 30th sample on march the 30th 2021 and a selfie photo was sent back of the event made up of 60 images from curiosity's mastcam and check out this shot no it's not a photo of clouds on earth these are martian clouds taken by the rover's right navigation camera yes clouds can be seen in the martian skies in localized places and are made of water ice which is condensed on dust particles suspended in the atmosphere curiosity is a tough and advanced rover but the perseverance rover is still much more advanced than any of its predecessors so much that we should take a closer look at percy the rover still has the same rectangular body six wheels a robotic arm a drill for sampling rocks and a laser for zapping them too as you previously saw its cameras and scientific instruments are much different because the two rovers have different goals curiosity checking out habitability and perseverance hunting for evidence of ancient martians with its 23 cameras and other special instruments the science instruments on perseverance are state-of-the-art tools made to check martian geology the atmosphere environmental conditions and those bio signatures soon it's going to be using these tools and running cutting-edge experiments including making oxygen on mars for future colonies is equipped with the mast cam zed which is an advanced camera system with panoramic and stereoscopic imaging capability and zoom features as the ability to take high definition video and panoramic color and 3d images and can also determine what minerals are on the surface of the planet meda is the mars environmental dynamic analyzer which will take measurements of mars weather including wind speed and direction and tell us everything we need to know about the martian weather so when humans get down on the surface we know what to expect making oxygen is going to be important for a couple of reasons moxie which stands for mars oxygen in situ resource utilization experiment is a tech demonstrator that can make oxygen from carbon dioxide in the martian atmosphere using a process called solid oxide electrolysis if we're going to colonize mars we need a propellant for rockets and landers to get on and off the planet and liquid oxygen is something that could be made right on mars and could fuel the mars ascent vehicles if the moxie demonstrator is successful nasa could build and land a 200 percent larger moxie along with a 25 to 30 kilowatt power plant and in one earth year the system could produce 4.4 pounds of oxygen per hour the stored oxygen could be used for life support a low-grade fuel or a primary fuel reacted with water to form methane this system could also fill a small oxygen tank of a spacecraft to return some of the samples that perseverance and curiosity are picking up pixel which stands for planetary instrument for x-ray lithochemistry is an x-ray spectrometer that can identify chemical elements at a tiny scale it can take super close-up photos of rock and soil and can image features as small as a grain of salt this will be one of the devices helping to look for microbial life rimfax is the radar imager for mars's subsurface experiment which will shoot a ground penetrating radar to get images of what's under the surface of mars and what it looks like no one is sure what lies beneath the ground on mars now with this instrument we're about to find out sherlock yes that's its real name is the scanning habitable environments with ramen and luminescence for organics and chemicals this is the big thing you see mounted on the end of the rover's robotic arm it's a real high-tech looking device that uses cameras spectrometers and a laser that the rover uses to search for organics and minerals that have been altered by a watery environment because who would sherlock be without watson it has a black and white camera along with a color camera named watson that takes close-up images of rock grains and surface textures finally we come to the super cam this device can examine rocks and soil with its camera laser and spectrometers to find organic compounds related to past life on mars it's so powerful that it can identify chemical and mineral composition of targets as small as a pencil point more than 20 feet away the perseverance mission is just getting started and the world is watching in anticipation of what it will find everyone is hoping that ingenuity is going to start its next test flight soon and if successful will open a whole new world of off-world exploration by drone what do you think perseverance is going to find and do you think we'll be on mars before 2050 let us know what you think and make sure to stay tuned here when percy finds something we'll let you know thanks for watching

Channel: Destiny

Views: 574,801

Keywords: mars, INGENUITY Helicopter on Mars FIRST FLIGHT, Perseverance Rover, universe, space, science, scientists, galaxy, star, sun, earth, destiny, ridddle, what if, spacex, nasa, black hole, cosmos, moon Scientists Discovered, Scientists Are Worried, Should We Worry, Worry, Discovered, Just Discovered, Something Strange, Found, Scientists Can’t Explain, What’s Hidden Under, Scientists have found strange things on Mars, A lake with life was found on Mars

Id: KVcDBZRqN6Y

Length: 10min 46sec (646 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 20 2021