“Can you find the rover in this picture?”
On the 11th (local time), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) released a picture taken by a small drone ‘Insanity’ and asked the above question. The Insanity is the first flying vehicle ever launched by humans on a non-Earth planet. It successfully completed its historic first powered flight last April, and recently successfully completed its 11th flight.
The photo was taken during the 11th flight. The filming area is a part of the crater of Mars called ‘South Séítah’. If you look at the photo, you can see a wide surface, rocks, and sand dunes.
NASA said in the photo is the latest rover ‘Perseverance’. A black object is visible at the bottom of the image. It is the shadow of a drone in flight. “Go straight up from the shadows,” NASA said.
NASA also revealed the answer to ‘Find the Hidden Rover’. The rover is visible in the enlarged photo. It was difficult to find in photos taken from a distance. The distance between the drone and the rover was about 500m.
Injury is doing a great job of assisting the rover. Flying ahead of the rover, it identifies geological characteristics and aids in exploration. It’s the rover’s scout. Perseverance, which cannot fly and moves on wheels, must detour when it encounters obstacles such as sand dunes.
Meanwhile, Perseverance went on a full-scale scientific exploration mission. On the 6th, it succeeded in drilling a surface rock in an area named ‘crater bottom crack rough’, but failed to collect samples.
NASA set out to find the cause. The entire process of rock sampling of the rover was automatic. Perseverance is a method in which the rock is crushed with a drill at the tip of its arm, and then placed in a collecting bit and transferred to a titanium tube for storage.
According to NASA, everything went as planned. It was also confirmed that there was a hole in the rock and rock powder was piled up around the hole. On the other hand, there was nothing in the sample collection tube.
NASA concluded. The reason the sample was not placed in the collection tube seems to be because the rock was not hard enough to form a ‘large lump’. Instead of large clumps, only small fragments occurred, and it was presumed that some of the particles expected to be contained in the collection tube were left at the bottom of the hole.
“The rover worked as ordered, but the rock wasn’t cooperative,” said Louis Zandura, chief sampling engineer.
The rover is currently on the primary science path south of the landing site. The first expedition is completed when the rover returns to the landing pad. In this process, up to 8 of 43 soil and rock sampling tubes are filled.
A key goal of the expedition is to find traces of ancient microbes. The rock samples to be collected by Perseverance will be collected by NASA’s joint mission with the European Space Agency (ESA) and brought to Earth as early as 2031. The scientific community predicts that only then will it be possible to say with certainty whether ancient life existed on Mars billions of years ago.
Reporter Min-ha Yang (mh.yang@etnews.com), Electronic Newspaper Internet
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