If we were to, in a childish way, find a short for Perseverance, I would suggest Percy in memory of Percival Lowell.

Since a large part of Curiosity's mission included exploring Vera Rubin Ridge, it's interesting that "Vera" is also included in the 2020 rover's name.

Vera, per se...

Click to view attachment
Since there is no dedicated thread for Perseverance mapping yet, I will just post it here...Birds-eye view of the center of Mars2020 landing elipse marked with white "X"....looking west across ancient river delta towards Neretva valley...along the route of future traverse...

Officially, in the face of the pandemic, here is NASA’s communication concerning the launch of Perseverance.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7620

But since the situation is very evolutionary, we can probably fear a next postponement...
If you have well-sourced information, do not hesitate to relay.

It may not be the most important thing right now, but...

I also like to find answers to my questions but I am counting on you for the rest.

Excerpt from the link :

https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/03/20/facin...-orion-testing/

NASA plans to continue work on Mars rover, James Webb Space Telescope

"The coronavirus pandemic could have far-reaching impacts across a range of NASA missions, but agency officials said Thursday they will attempt to insulate two of NASA’s most critical robotic science missions from delays caused by COVID-19-related closures.
Lori Glaze, head of NASA’s planetary science division, said the Perseverance rover remains on schedule for liftoff during a limited 20-day window opening July 17. If the mission — also known as Mars 2020 — misses this summer’s launch window, the next chance to send the rover to Mars won’t be until 2022, a delay that could add to the $2.5 billion mission’s price tag.
“We’ve put together a framework … with which to look at each of the missions and what points we want to continue working on them,” Glaze said in a virtual town hall meeting Thursday with members of the planetary science community. “And Mars 2020 is one of only two missions within (NASA’s science directorate) that is the very highest priority … We’re going to ensure that we meet that launch window in July."
“In so doing, we’re also making sure that our personnel are healthy and safe,” Glaze said. “We’re taking every precaution to make sure that those individuals that are working on Mars 2020 are going to work in conditions and have an environment where they’re able to stay safe. But we’re continuing the activities, the integration and test activities, that are going on at Kennedy Space Center.”
The Perseverance rover arrived at the Kennedy Space Center last month from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Inside a pristine, climate-controlled clean room at the Florida spaceport, the rover will be installed on its landing platform and attached to a cruise stage that will carry it from Earth to Mars.
Then the spacecraft will be enclosed within the nose cone of a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket and trucked to the Atlas 5’s seaside launch complex for lifting atop the vehicle. Once in place, teams will add the rover’s plutonium power generator.
Glaze said members of the Mars 2020 team from KSC, JPL, NASA Headquarters and the Department of Energy — responsible for the nuclear power source — have given their “full support” for the plan.
“As of right now, and even if we go to a next stage of alert, Mars 2020 is moving forward on schedule and everything is so far very well on track,” Glaze said. “At this point, we don’t see any impact from the current situation.”
The Perseverance rover mission is one of two high-priority projects within NASA’s science division that are pre-approved to continue work even if the agency elevates all centers to Stage 4 in the coronavirus response plan."

The advantages of working in a sterile environment/clean room are now very obvious these days, that's for sure...

From any point of view.
It would be a shame to contaminate Martian life with this crap.

I'm not sure what you're wondering about. I think Lori's Glaze's statement is pretty clear that work is continuing on M2020.

I'm not empowered to share details but I can assure you that the statement is accurate.

None of us can predict the future, obviously.

I did not express myself well, I am not very proficient in English and a finesse in French can be a mistake in another language.



I had no doubt about that.

Have a nice day

Interesting to see the Mars Helicopter in stowed configuration.

Looks exposed. Hope the engine blast does kick up too many pebbles. But I'm sure the engineers have thought about this.

It has a hangar. The footage released of thermal testing shows the cover in place. https://vimeo.com/381357280 ( 11 minutes in )

Hangar gets dropped. Rover drives on leaving it behind. Helicopter gets deployed.

Thanks Doug: Looking at the mechanism retaining the helicopter to the belly of the rover that we can see in great detail on PIA23823 one can sort of work out how it is released and rotated to the surface by the actuators and hinges etc

I'm sure JPL outreach and engineering have videoed that release mechanism working many times and maybe even animated the steps in the sequence of dropping the hangar, driving away and then deploying the helicopter. I expect they will treat us to that in the not too distant future, hopefully before launch.

BTW the mission countdown timer shows just over 79 days remaining until the first day of the launch window opens

Thank you for the additional information

Great picture.. Its really quite a remarkably beautiful piece of equipment thats larger than it appears, and fun to guess what the sequence will be, so im guessing the legs self-deploy under their own spring tension, with the two legs we see on top have their actuators to release, most likely before the triangular hinge activates to rotate the craft 90 degrees, that rotation itself perhaps allows the bottom two legs to slide from their slots without actuators...well see.

The helicopter drone now has a name: Ingenuity.

Here is the raw media reel on YouTube... We can see the Delivery Sytsem (release and deploy) beginning at the 5:12 time stamp

link

Not yet confirmed by NASA, but it appears that the launch date for the Mars 2020 mission is expected to slip to July 20 due to a “little bit of a hiccup” with Atlas 5 launch vehicle processing.

Apparently it was caused by an issue with a crane at the launch facility (see reply by ULA's Tory Bruno).

Refer to this Twitter thread LINK.

A screen capture of the thread is provided for those without Twitter.

Click to view attachment

Fascinating to see that video. Thanks for posting. At the end it shows some helicopter test flights on a very smooth and hard surface. The landing looks bouncy and fast. I assume the legs have been designed to prevent the helicopter from toppling over under most conditions. Still, I wonder, does anybody know if this has been tested on a sandy, bumpy surface with the occasionally rock to bump into? I tried to find any information/videos but without success.

Those are early tests. I'm pretty confident that they have smoothed it out quite a bit. I've crashed more than my share of small helicopters and if they haven't smoothed it out since that video, it will tip over for sure on any natural terrain.

At 3:30 in the video there is a very well controlled vertical landing that is much different than those shown at the end of the video. I'm sure this is how the landings on Mars will be handled.

I have been reading up ahead of the launch and hopefully safe landing of Perseverance rover on Mars. I am surprised at the energy constraints the Curiosity rover had to work with given that 110 W are used to generate electricity for rover operations on the surface but a part of it also is' wasted' in keeping the rover parts warm. Has anything changed with the new Perseverance rover regarding energy usage ??

RTG's work by having a strong difference in temperature between thermocouples: RTGs work by converting thermal energy into electrical energy through devices known as thermocouples. The natural decay of plutonium-238 produces heat that is then transferred to one side of the thermocouple. The temperature difference between the fuel and the atmosphere allows the device to convert this heat into electricity. The most current RTG model, the Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (MMRTG), provides approximately 110 Watts of electrical power when freshly fueled. DOE webpage

To create the difference, there must be a *hot* heat source, in this case plutonium-238. Not all of the heat gets converted to electricity (3-4% as a I recall). You'll note the fins on the RTG unit as one part of this. However, rovers and spacecraft need to be kept warm inside, and so some of that heat is piped through the body. The benefit isn't trivial - half of the electrical power in the solar powered Juno spacecraft goes to heaters. (Missions can also request to use radioisotope heater units, are are basically units with a little Pu-238 in them that can provide heat. See the list of missions below that have used them.)

The Department of Energy (which develops RTG technology) is planning a new generation of RTGs to be available toward the end of this decade that would be around twice as efficient in converting the heat to electricity.

Missions that used RHUs:

NASA missions enabled by radioisotope heater units

Apollo 11 EASEP Lunar Radioisotope Heater - contained two 15W RHUs
Pioneer 10 & 11 - 12 RHUs each
Voyager 1 & 2 - 9 RHUs each
Galileo - 120 RHUs (103 on orbiter, 17 on atmospheric probe)
Mars Pathfinder Sojourner Rover - 3 RHUs
Cassini - 117 RHUs (82 on orbiter, 35 on Huygens Titan probe)
MER Spirit & Opportunity Rovers - 8 RHUs each

RHU webpage

The RHU discussion is interesting but as noted neither MSL nor M2020 use them; they use a fluid loop that is directly heated by waste heat from the RTG, and electrical heaters for external components. AFAIK no non-rover has ever used a fluid loop, but I could be mistaken.

https://trs.jpl.nasa.gov/bitstream/handle/2...15-2733_A1b.pdf has a discussion of the fairly minor thermal-control changes between MSL and M2020.

The energy is not really wasted, the motors and joints have to be warmed up to work correctly on Mars, as it gets extremely cold there at night, as there is virtually no atmosphere to regulate the night time temperatures.

IIRC Soviet probes of the 2MV and 3MV series (e.g. Zond 3) used fluid loops for thermal control

When I said "fluid loop" I meant "fluid loop heated by the RTG". Look at the Cassini and Galileo examples, that had big RTGs and a whole bunch of little RHUs, leaving all the RTG heat just being wasted into space. Of course fluid loops have their own problems.



Depends on your definition of "wasted". The original plan for MSL was to use dry lubricants that wouldn't require any heating to operate. This proved unworkable and was one of the major reasons for the launch slip from 2009 to 2011: see https://www.thespacereview.com/article/1319/1

I know that several proposals to the outer solar system have planned to use fluid loops.

[ADMIN- edited for accidental duplication of post]

More information about the helicopter here: https://trs.jpl.nasa.gov/bitstream/handle/2...L%2317-6243.pdf

Brilliant. Thanks. That answers my question. I'll take away that the landing system is fairly robust in terms of surface properties (soft/hard) but that the area for a test flight should only contain a few rocks higher than 5 cm and a general slope of up to 10 degrees.

Getting exciting as we approach the launch date.

Just watching the final assembly of the rover and packing for the transit to Mars, along with some great detail pictures of the 'skycrane'.

Was wondering if anyone had any reference to PDFs etc. on the development of this part of the EDL? And the control software?
For example, was this one (or Curiosity's) system tested in any way, as per the helicopter? Or was that impractical and it was all done with simulations and component testing?

Thanks for any detail:)

Answering my own post here but managed to locate a few interesting PDFs about the Descent Stage for MSL/Curiosity. Not sure how much of the system has been upgraded for this mission though.

Launch Window: July 22 - Aug. 11, 2020

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/

A good source of information is the JPL Tech Report Server at https://trs.jpl.nasa.gov . Go there and search for "skycrane". See, for example, https://trs.jpl.nasa.gov/bitstream/handle/2...L%2316-2401.pdf

Technically there were fluid loops in the Cassini RTGs, but they were for cooling during ground handling - they didnt take the heat to the spacecraft. There was some exploitation of conducted/radiated heat in keeping the propulsion system a bit warm, but in fact there were shields to keep the RTGs from radiating too much heat onto the instruments.

A recent example of a non-RTG non-rover pumped fluid loop is Parker Solar Probe.

Dragonfly (which you could not unreasonably describe as a rover) will use a fluid loop, in the same way as Curiosity.

For that matter, the Viking landers had a fluid loop, also primarily used during ground handling to keep the lander interior cool (each of the landers' two RTGs produced more heat in Earth's sea-level-pressure and warmish atmosphere environment than in vacuum or on the surface of Mars). The coolant loop was also used during the two-day terminal sterilization cycle when the lander was baked in a giant oven, to pump sterile hot water through the loop to heat the lander interior more quickly than would otherwise occur due to the very effective body insulation.

During portions of the on-surface mission corresponding to Mars local winter, heat from the RTGs was conducted into the lander via automatic Thermal Switches.

Launch delayed to the 30th due to rocket sensor issue. They are extending the optimistic launch window to the 15th of August.
https://www.mynews13.com/fl/orlando/ap-onli...eks-left-to-fly

Here is a Google Earth overlay showing the rover/drone landing site. It has a geologic overlay map and a HiRISE image covering most of the ellipse. Would do the same for Tianwen but... it's just a giant polygon over Utopia.

I'm curious about MOXIE. It separates oxygen from the carbon in CO2. The Oxygen is released as a gas, but what form will the carbon be?

Dumped as gaseous carbon monoxide and unseparated CO2. It's worth noting that AFAIK the O2 is not actually collected, just measured to see that it existed. You could ask how useful this really is, but I'm not a chemist so my opinion doesn't count.

https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/marsdust2017/pdf/6036.pdf

Thanks for that.

I wonder what route the rover will take? Here is a wild guess: W then SW until it finds a way up the escarpment:

Click to view attachment

I found this resource on NASA's own site to be misleading:

An animation at
https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/timeline/surface-operations/

Shows a mission traversal in which the rover climbs the fan deposit once and returns to the bottom, leaving a cache. Then it climbs on a second, similar but different route, and returns to the bottom, leaving the other cache.

Other discussion here indicates that the plan is to ascend the south (from Perseverance's POV, left) side of the fan deposit, and keep going west, leaving two caches atop the plain outside the crater.

If the second is correct, it's unfortunate that NASA has an animation with incorrect information featured so prominently.

To be fair, considering that MSR mission design is still evolving it may be asking a lot to hold them to a high standard of accuracy here. Investing the time and money to update this & other EPO/PR tool every time things change before CDR (which is undoubtedly still years away) doesn't seem like a wise use of resources.