Free Astronomy Magazine March-April 2021

scathed but had sent data back to Earth for just 14.5 seconds. The con- troversial results provided by the Viking landers on the possible exis- tence of traces of life on Mars high- lighted the need for vehicles capa- ble of moving to multiple locations on the Martian surface. This solu- tion would have made it possible to carry out experiments at different geological sites and to choose the targets to be examined from time to time on the basis of the morpholog- ical and mineralogical characteris- tics of the soil. The surface of Mars is made up of many types of rocks, each made up 5 MARCH-APRIL 2021 MARS ROVERS T he Perseverance rover in a clean room in Pasadena, California, before it was transported to Florida for its launch. Perseverance looks virtually the same as Curiosity, but there are a number of differences. The most remarkable is that this rover can sample and cache minerals. To do so, Perseverance has a new coring drill to collect samples. [NASA/JPL-Caltech] of a mixture of diagnostic minerals and chemicals. Unlike a simple lander, a rover can travel to different areas, studying different rocks and the different chemicals in each rock. These chem- icals can tell scientists something about the environments that changed that rock over time and, in the search for ancient life, reveal clues of past water activity. Based on the many benefits of rovers, yet in a phase of considerable budget cuts for the American space agency, NASA and the Jet Propulsion Labo- ratory set up a mission known as Mars Pathfinder (MPF) in the early 1990s. The mission’s goal was to demonstrate the technological fea- sibility of sending a stationary lan- der and a robotic rover to Mars to explore the surface.