Free Astronomy Magazine March-April 2021

46 MARCH-APRIL 2021 MARS ROVERS this year. Within the lander is a rover equipped with cameras, a spectro- scope, meteorological equipment, and ground-penetrating radar. If all goes well, China will be only the third nation to successfully land on Mars (behind the Soviet Union and United States) and only the second nation to successfully land a mobile laboratory. Among Martians and Mars enthusi- asts alike, the most famous scien- tific organization on the planet’s surface is NASA. On February 18 th , the next mission in the NASA Mars Exploration Program, Mars 2020, delivered a number of new scien- tific instruments in a single rover to study the history and possible fu- ture of Mars habitability, as well as to specifically search for evidence of past microbial life on the Mar- tian surface. The Perseverance rover (“Percy” for short), like Hope and Tianwen-1, are launched by a single entity but are international efforts in terms of the several countries producing different scientific in- struments, with facilities in France, Norway, and Spain providing or co- undemonstrated rover, Persever- ance is a first test of a demon- strated rover design and undemon- strated powered flight. Packed un- derneath Percy is “Ingenuity” – a small and lightweight helicopter set to be the first aerial device to travel over and survey another planet. With a total of five planned flights over the course of 30 days, Ingenu- ity and its successors offer the pos- sibility of greatly extending the distances that a rover can travel by providing much higher resolution imaging of troublesome surface features than is possible from either orbit or from the rovers themselves, all while producing some of the most remarkable drone photogra- phy ever recorded. These aerial scouts can also provide hi-res imag- ing to aid in the selection of inter- esting features, thereby also re- ducing the target selection times and potentially greatly increasing the rate of scientific discovery. T ogether with the Perseverance rover, the Ingenuity helicopter landed on Mars this past February 18 th . Its mission is to demonstrate the first powered flight on another planet, taking to the Martian skies in Spring 2021. [NASA/JPL-Caltech] T he main structural components of the Ingenuity helicopter, scheduled for up to five flights in one month. [NASA] developing some of Percy’s onboard scientific hardware. Just as Pathfinder and Sojourner were the first tests of a lander and