About Perseverance Rover | UPSC Current Affairs

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Context:

NASA Mars Perseverance Rover Triumphantly Completes First Sample Depot on Another World.

About:

Perseverance, nicknamed Percy, is a car-sized Mars rover designed to explore the crater Jezero on Mars as part of NASA's Mars 2020 mission.
Perseverance has been active on Mars for 130 sols (133 Earth days) since its landing.
Following the rover's arrival, NASA named the landing site Octavia E. Butler Landing.
Perseverance has a similar design to its predecessor rover, Curiosity, from which it was moderately upgraded.
It carries seven primary payload instruments, nineteen cameras, and two microphones.
The rover also carried the mini-helicopter Ingenuity to Mars, an experimental aircraft and technology showcase that made the first powered flight on another planet on 19 April 2021.

Broad Objectives of Mars 2020 Mission:

Looking for habitability: Identify past environments that were capable of supporting microbial life.
Seeking bio-signatures: Seek signs of possible past microbial life in those habitable environments, particularly in specific rock types known to preserve signs over time.
Caching samples: Collect core rock and regolith ("soil") samples and store them on the Martian surface.
Preparing for humans: Test oxygen production from the Martian atmosphere.

Read: iasgyan.in/daily-current-affairs/nasas-perseverance-missio