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7 Things to Know about the Perseverance Mars Rover

We’re set to launch the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on July 30. The rover is loaded with scientific instruments and advanced technology, making it the largest, heaviest and most sophisticated vehicle ever sent to the Red Planet.

What is Perseverance’s mission and what will it do on Mars? Here are seven things to know:

1. Perseverance draws on the NASA – and scientific – spirit of overcoming challenges

Not only does it have to launch during a pandemic and land on a treacherous planet, it has to carry out its science goals:

Searching for signs of past microbial life

Mapping out the planet’s geology and climate

Collecting rock and other samples for future return to Earth

Paving the way for human exploration

We chose the name Perseverance from among the 28,000 essays submitted during the "Name the Rover" contest. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, the months leading up to the launch in particular have required creative problem solving, teamwork and determination.

2. Perseverance builds on the lessons from other Mars rovers

In 1997, our first Mars rover – Sojourner – showed that a robot could rove on the Red Planet. Spirit and Opportunity, which both landed in 2004, found evidence that Mars once had water before becoming a frozen desert.

Curiosity found evidence that Mars’ Gale Crater was home to a lake billions of years ago and that there was an environment that may have sustained microbial life. Perseverance aims to answer the age-old question – are there any signs that life once existed on Mars?

3. Perseverance will land in a place with high potential to find signs of ancient life

The rover will land in Jezero Crater, a 28-mile wide basin north of the Martian equator. A space rock hit the surface long ago, creating the large hole. Between 3 and 4 billion years ago, a river flowed into a body of water in Jezero the size of Lake Tahoe.

4. Perseverance will also collect important data about Mars’ geology and climate

Mars orbiters have collected images and other data about Jezero Crater from about 200 miles above, but finding signs of past life will need much closer inspection. A rover like Perseverance can look for those signs that may be related to ancient life and analyze the context in which they were found to see if the origins were biological.

5. Perseverance is the first leg of a round trip to Mars

This is the first rover to bring a sample-gathering system to Mars that will package promising samples of rocks and other materials for future return to Earth. NASA and ESA are working on the Mars Sample Return campaign, so we can analyze the rocks and sediment with tools too large and complex to send to space.

6. Perseverance will pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet

Two packages -- one that helps the rover autonomously avoid hazards during landing (TRN) and another that gathers crucial data during the trip through Mars’ atmosphere (MEDLI2) – will help future human missions land safely and with larger payloads on other worlds.

There are two instruments that will specifically help astronauts on the Red Planet. One (MEDA) will provide key information about the planet’s weather, climate and dust activity, while a technology demonstration (MOXIE) aims to extract oxygen from Mars’ mostly carbon-dioxide atmosphere.

7. You get to ride along

Perseverance and other parts of the Mars 2020 spacecraft feature 23 cameras, which is more than any other interplanetary mission in history. Raw images from the camera are set to be released on the mission website.

There are also three silicon chips with the names of nearly 11 million people who signed up to send their names to Mars.

And you can continue to follow the mission on Twitter and Facebook. 

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How Do You Like Your Turkey? Home-Cooked or Rocket-Launched?

It’s Thanksgiving, which means that you’re probably thinking about food right now. And here at NASA, we have to think about food very seriously when we explore space!

Astronauts Need to Eat, Too!

Like for you on Earth, nutrition plays a key role in maintaining the health and optimal performance of the astronauts. The Space Food Systems team is required to meet the nutritional needs of each crew member while adhering to the requirements of limited storage space, limited preparation options, and the difficulties of eating without gravity. 

Good food is necessary being comfortable on a mission a long way from home — especially for crewmembers who are on board for many months at a time. It’s important that the astronauts like the food they’re eating everyday, even given the preparation constraints!

Astronaut Food Has Not Always Been Appetizing

The early space programs were groundbreaking in a lot of ways — but not when it came to food. Like today, crumbs had to be prevented from scattering in microgravity and interfering with the instruments. Mercury astronauts had to endure bite-sized cubes, freeze-dried powders, and semi-liquids stuffed into aluminum tubes. The freeze-dried food were hard to rehydrate, squeezing the tubes was understandable unappetizing, and the food was generally considered to be, like spaceflight, a test of endurance.

However, over the years, packaging improved, which in turn enhanced food quality and choices. The Apollo astronauts were the first to have hot water, which made rehydrating foods easier and improved the food’s taste. And even the Space Shuttle astronauts had opportunities to design their own menus and choose foods commercially available on grocery store shelves. 

 The Wonders of Modern Space Food

Nowadays, astronauts on the International Space Station have the opportunity to sample a variety of foods and beverages prepared by the Space Food Systems team and decide which ones they prefer. They can add water to rehydratable products or eat products that are ready to eat off the shelf.

All the cooking and preparation has been done for them ahead of time because 1) they don’t have room for a kitchen to cook on the space station 2) they don’t have time to cook! The crewmembers are extremely occupied with station maintenance as well as scientific research on board, so meal times have to be streamlined as much as possible. 

Instead of going grocery shopping, bulk overwrap bags (BOBs!) are packed into cargo transfer bags for delivery to the space station. Meal based packaging allows the astronauts to have entrees, side dishes, snacks, and desserts to choose from. 

Taste in Space

The perception of taste changes in space. In microgravity, astronauts experience a fluid shift in their bodies, so the sensation is similar to eating with a headcold. The taste is muted so crewmembers prefer spicy foods or food with condiments to enhance the flavor. 

We Can’t Buy Groceries, But We Can Grow Food!

Growing plants aboard the space station provides a unique opportunity to study how plants adapt to microgravity. Plants may serve as a food source for long term missions, so it’s critical to understand how spaceflight affects plant growth. Plus, having fresh food available in space can have a positive impact on astronauts’ moods!

Since 2002, the Lada greenhouse has been used to perform almost continuous plant growth experiments on the station. We have grown a vast variety of plants, including thale cress, swiss chard, cabbage, lettuce, and mizuna. 

And in 2015, Expedition 44 members became the first American astronauts to eat plants grown in space when they munched on their harvest of Red Romaine. 

Earthlings Can Eat Space Food, Too

To give you a clear idea of how diverse the selection is for astronauts on board the space station, two earthlings gave the astronaut menu a try for a full week. Besides mentioning once that hot sauce was needed, they fared pretty well! (The shrimp cocktail was a favorite.)

Space Technology for Food on Earth

Not only has our space food improved, but so has our ability measure food production on Earth. Weather that is too dry, too wet, too hot, or too cool can strongly affect a farmer’s ability to grow crops. We collaborated with the United States Agency for International Development to create a system for crop yield prediction based on satellite data: the GEOGLAM Crop Monitor for Early Warning.

This map measures the health, or “greenness” of vegetation based on how much red or near-infrared light the leaves reflect. Healthy vegetation reflects more infrared light and less visible light than stressed vegetation. As you can see from the map, a severe drought spread across southern Mexico to Panama in June to August of this year. 

The Crop Monitor compiles different types of crop condition indicators — such as temperature, precipitation, and soil moisture — and shares them with 14 national and international partners to inform relief efforts.

Thanksgiving in Space 

Space food has certainly come a long way from semi-liquids squeezed into aluminum tubes! This year, Expedition 57 crewmembers Commander Alexander Gerst and Flight Engineer Serena M. Auñón-Chancellor are looking forward to enjoying a Thanksgiving meal that probably sounds pretty familiar to you: turkey, stuffing, candied yams, and even spicy pound cakes!

Hungry for More?

If you can’t get enough of space food, tune into this episode of “Houston, We Have a Podcast” and explore the delicious science of astronaut mealtime with Takiyah Sirmons. 

And whether you’re eating like a king or an astronaut, we wish everybody a happy and safe Thanksgiving!

Cosmic Couples and Devastating Breakups

Relationships can be complicated — especially if you’re a pair of stars. Sometimes you start a downward spiral you just can’t get out of, eventually crash together and set off an explosion that can be seen 130 million light-years away.

For Valentine’s Day, we’re exploring the bonds between some of the universe’s peculiar pairs … as well as a few of their cataclysmic endings.

Stellar Couples

When you look at a star in the night sky, you may really be viewing two or more stars dancing around each other. Scientists estimate three or four out of every five Sun-like stars in the Milky Way have at least one partner. Take our old north star Thuban, for example. It’s a binary, or two-star, system in the constellation Draco.

Alpha Centauri, our nearest stellar neighbor, is actually a stellar triangle. Two Sun-like stars, Rigil Kentaurus and Toliman, form a pair (called Alpha Centauri AB) that orbit each other about every 80 years. Proxima Centauri is a remote red dwarf star caught in their gravitational pull even though it sits way far away from them (like over 300 times the distance between the Sun and Neptune).

Credit: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2/Davide De Martin/Mahdi Zamani

Sometimes, though, a stellar couple ends its relationship in a way that’s really disastrous for one of them. A black widow binary, for example, contains a low-mass star, called a brown dwarf, and a rapidly spinning, superdense stellar corpse called a pulsar. The pulsar generates intense radiation and particle winds that blow away the material of the other star over millions to billions of years.

Black Hole Beaus

In romance novels, an air of mystery is essential for any love interest, and black holes are some of the most mysterious phenomena in the universe. They also have very dramatic relationships with other objects around them!

Scientists have observed two types of black holes. Supermassive black holes are hundreds of thousands to billions of times our Sun’s mass. One of these monsters, called Sagittarius A* (the “*” is pronounced “star”), sits at the center of our own Milky Way. In a sense, our galaxy and its black hole are childhood sweethearts — they’ve been together for over 13 billion years! All the Milky-Way-size galaxies we’ve seen so far, including our neighbor Andromeda (pictured below), have supermassive black holes at their center!

These black-hole-galaxy power couples sometimes collide with other, similar pairs — kind of like a disastrous double date! We’ve never seen one of these events happen before, but scientists are starting to model them to get an idea of what the resulting fireworks might look like.

One of the most dramatic and fleeting relationships a supermassive black hole can have is with a star that strays too close. The black hole’s gravitational pull on the unfortunate star causes it to bulge on one side and break apart into a stream of gas, which is called a tidal disruption event.

The other type of black hole you often hear about is stellar-mass black holes, which are five to tens of times the Sun’s mass. Scientists think these are formed when a massive star goes supernova. If there are two massive stars in a binary, they can leave behind a pair of black holes that are tied together by their gravity. These new black holes spiral closer and closer until they crash together and create a larger black hole. The National Science Foundation’s LIGO project has detected many of these collisions through ripples in space-time called gravitational waves.

Credit: LIGO/T. Pyle

Here’s hoping your Valentine’s Day is more like a peacefully spiraling stellar binary and less like a tidal disruption! Learn how to have a safe relationship of your own with black holes here.

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The James Webb Space Telescope: A Story of Art & Science

Artists of all kinds were invited to apply for the chance to visit our Goddard Space Flight Center to be inspired by the giant, golden, fully-assembled James Webb Space Telescope mirror.

Art/Photo Credit: Jedidiah Dore

Webb has a mirror that is nearly 22 feet high and (to optimize it for infrared observations) is covered in a microscopic layer of actual gold.

Art/Photo Credit: Susan Lin

Because of Webb’s visually striking appearance, the project hosted a special viewing event on Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2016.

Photo Credit: Maggie Masetti

There was an overwhelming response to the event invitation and ultimately twenty-four people were selected to attend. They represented a broad range of artistic media and styles, including: watercolor, 3D printed sculpture, silk screening, acrylics, sumi-e (East Asian brush technique), comics, letterpress, woodwork, metalwork, jewelry making, fiber art, ink, mural painting, kite-making, tattooing, scientific illustration, poetry, songwriting, and video making.

Art/Photo Credit: Sue Reno

Project scientists and engineers spoke with visitors to give context to what they were seeing and explain why Webb is an engineering marvel, and how it will change our view of the universe. 

Among other things, Webb will see the first stars and galaxies that formed in the early universe and help us to better understand how planetary systems form and evolve. It will help us answer questions about who we, as humans, are and where we came from.

Art Credit: Jessica Lee Photo Credit: Maggie Masetti

The artists spent several hours sitting right in front of the telescope, where they sketched, painted, took photos and even filmed a music video.

Art Credit: Joanna Barnum Photo Credit: Maggie Masetti

While some of the pieces of art are finished, most of the artists went home with their heads full of ideas and sketchbooks full of notes. Stay tuned for more info on where you can see their final works displayed!

Art/Photo Credit: Susan Lin

Finished art from the event continues to be added HERE.

The James Webb Space Telescope is finishing environmental testing at our Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Next it will head to our Johnson Space Center in Houston for an end-to-end test at cryogenic temperatures. After that, it goes to Northrop Grumman to be mated with the giant tennis court-sized sunshield and the spacecraft bus.  The observatory will launch in October of 2018 from a European Space Agency (ESA) launch site in French Guiana, aboard an Ariane 5 rocket.  Webb is a collaboration of NASA, ESA, and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).

Follow Webb on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

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Hostile and Closed Environments, Hazards at Close Quarters

A human journey to Mars, at first glance, offers an inexhaustible amount of complexities. To bring a mission to the Red Planet from fiction to fact, NASA’s Human Research Program has organized some of the hazards astronauts will encounter on a continual basis into five classifications.

A spacecraft is not only a home, it’s also a machine. NASA understands that the ecosystem inside a vehicle plays a big role in everyday astronaut life.

Important habitability factors include temperature, pressure, lighting, noise, and quantity of space. It’s essential that astronauts are getting the requisite food, sleep and exercise needed to stay healthy and happy. The space environment introduces challenges not faced on Earth.

Technology, as often is the case with out-of-this-world exploration, comes to the rescue! Technology plays a big role in creating a habitable home in a harsh environment and monitoring some of the environmental conditions.

Astronauts are also asked to provide feedback about their living environment, including physical impressions and sensations so that the evolution of spacecraft can continue addressing the needs of humans in space.

Exploration to the Moon and Mars will expose astronauts to five known hazards of spaceflight, including hostile and closed environments, like the closed environment of the vehicle itself. To learn more, and find out what NASA’s Human Research Program is doing to protect humans in space, check out the "Hazards of Human Spaceflight" website. Or, check out this week’s episode of “Houston We Have a Podcast,” in which host Gary Jordan further dives into the threat of hostile and closed environments with Brian Crucian, NASA immunologist at the Johnson Space Center.

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History Made: Apollo 11 Splashes Down Today in 1969

The Apollo 11 Command Module “Columbia” is hoisted onto its recovery ship the USS Hornet, following splashdown on July 24, 1969. Credit: NASA

Four days after their historic achievement, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins splashed down in the Pacific Ocean at 12:49 p.m. EDT, about 900 miles from Hawaii. The crew was recovered by the crew of the USS Hornet where President Richard Nixon was waiting to greet them. 

Watch a replay of the original live broadcast of the recovery on NASA TV starting at 12:45 p.m. EDT. 

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ICYMI: New sounds from Mars dropped! Turn the volume up to hear our Ingenuity Mars Helicopter flying on the Red Planet.

Captured by our Perseverance Mars Rover, this is the first time a spacecraft on another planet has recorded the sounds of a separate spacecraft. In this audio track, Perseverance used its SuperCam microphone to listen to the Ingenuity helicopter on April 30, 2021 as it flew on Mars for the fourth time.

With Perseverance parked 262 feet (80 meters) from the helicopter’s takeoff and landing spot, the mission wasn’t sure if the microphone would pick up any sound of the flight. Even during flight when the helicopter’s blades are spinning at 2,537 rpm, the sound is greatly muffled by the thin Martian atmosphere. It is further obscured by Martian wind gusts during the initial moments of the flight. Listen closely, though, and the helicopter’s hum can be heard faintly above the sound of those winds.

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NASA Sees Our Ocean in Color. How About You?

Take a deep breath. Feel the oxygen in your lungs. We have the ocean to thank for that! Over long time scales, between 50 and 70 percent of our planet's oxygen is produced by microscopic organisms living in the ocean.

Today is World Oceans Day! And as our planet’s climate continues to change, we want to understand how one of our biggest ecosystems is changing with it. Wondering how you can celebrate with NASA? We’ve got downloadable coloring pages and online coloring interactives to show how we study the ocean. Read on.

From Space to Sea

Download ocean missions coloring page here Download Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich coloring page here

We use planes, boats, Earth-observing satellites and much more to study the ocean and partner with organizations all over the world. Here are a few examples:

From Sea

The Export Processes in the Ocean from Remote Sensing (EXPORTS) is one way we study the ocean from the sea to study changes in the ocean’s carbon cycle. In May, scientists and crew conducted research on three ships in the Northern Atlantic Ocean. They hope to create models to better understand climate change patterns.

From Space

Launched last year, the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich spacecraft began a five-and-a-half-year prime mission to collect the most accurate data yet on global sea level and how our oceans are rising in response to climate change. Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich is just one of many satellites monitoring the ocean from space. Together with other Earth-observing spacecraft, the mission will also collect precise data of atmospheric temperature and humidity to help improve weather forecasts and climate models.

Finding Eddies

Download Eddies Coloring Page The ocean is full of eddies – swirling water masses that look like hurricanes in the atmosphere. Eddies are often hot spots for biological activity that plays an important role in absorbing carbon. . We find eddies by looking for small changes in the height of the ocean surface, using multiple satellites continuously orbiting Earth. We also look at eddies up close, using ships and planes to study their role in the carbon cycle.

Monitoring Aerosols and Clouds

Clouds coloring interactive here

Aerosols coloring interactive here

Tiny particles in the air called aerosols interact with clouds. These interactions are some of the most poorly understood components of Earth's climate system. Clouds and aerosols can absorb, scatter or reflect incoming radiation -- heat and light from the Sun -- depending on their type, abundance and locations in the atmosphere. We’re building new instruments to better understand aerosols and contribute to air quality forecasts.

The Ocean in Living Color Download PACE coloring page here

The Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) mission will continue and greatly advance observations of global ocean color, biogeochemistry, and ecology, as well as Earth’s carbon cycle and atmospheric aerosols and clouds. It’s set to launch in late 2023 to early 2024. Want to learn more? Click here to see how PACE will collect data and here to see what PACE will see through our coloring interactives. (Make sure to check out the hidden surprises in both!)

Exploring Ocean Worlds on Earth and Beyond

Download Clouds coloring page here

Using our understanding of oceans on Earth, we also study oceans on other planets. Mars, for example, contains water frozen in the ice caps or trapped beneath the soil. But there’s even more water out there. Planets and moons in our solar system and beyond have giant oceans on their surface. Saturn’s moon Enceladus is thought to have a massive ocean under its frozen surface, which sometimes sprays into space through massive fissures in the ice.

Learn more about ocean worlds here: nasa.gov/oceanworlds

Interested in learning more about how NASA studies oceans? Follow @NASAClimate, @NASAOcean and @NASAEarth.

You can also find all the coloring pages and interactives here.

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Water on Mars!

Did you hear? New findings from our Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) provide the strongest evidence yet that liquid water flows intermittently on present-day Mars.

Using an imaging spectrometer on MRO, we found hydrated minerals on slopes where mysterious streaks are seen on Mars. One thing that researchers noticed was that the darkish streaks appear to ebb and flow over time. During warm seasons, they darken and then fade in cooler seasons.

When discovered in 2010, these downhill flows known as recurring slope lineae (RSL) were thought to be related to liquid water. With the recent spectral detection of molecular water, we’re able to say it’s likely a shallow subsurface flow explains the darkening.

Mars is so cold, how could liquid water flow there? Great question! Since this liquid water is briny, the freezing point would be lower than that of pure water. Also, these saline slopes appear on Mars when temperatures are above minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 23 Celsius).

The dark, narrow streaks flowing downhill in the below image are roughly the length of a football field.

So there’s water, but how much? Currently we think this area has a very small amount of water, probably just enough to wet the top layer of the surface of Mars. The streaks are around four to five meters wide and 200 to 300 meters long.

Could humans drink this water? The salts in the water appear to be perchlorates, so you probably wouldn’t want to drink the water. It would most likely be very salty and would need to be purified before human consumption.

Perchlorate...What is that? A perchlorate is a salt that absorbs water from the air. Learn more about how it’s helping us unlock the mysteries of Mars in this video:

What’s next? We want to look for more locations where brine flows may occur. We have only covered 3% of Mars at resolutions high enough to see these features.

For more information on the Mars announcement, visit our Journey to Mars landing page. There is also a full recap of the press conference HERE, and a short recap below.

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Using a fleet of research aircraft, our Operation IceBridge images Earth's polar ice to better understand connections between polar regions and the global climate system. IceBridge studies annual changes in thickness of sea ice, glaciers and ice sheets. IceBridge bridges the gap between the ICESat missions.

Seen here is a time-lapse view of a glacier-run from the cockpit of our P-3 Orion aircraft taken during a May 8, 2017 flight over Greenland's Southeast glaciers.

Video credit: NASA/Gerrit Everson

Take a look back at this season’s Arctic ice survey HERE.

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