The experiments that NASA’s Perseverance rover will conduct on Mars will pave the way for a human landing on the Red Planet, Director of the Skoltech Space Center Anton Ivanov told TASS on Friday, APA reports citing TASS.
"The Perseverance rover will carry out experiments that are crucial for testing ideas related to resource extraction and future Mars missions. In general, the rover’s research program will help pave the way for a human landing on Mars and get a better understanding on whether life could have ever developed there," the researcher pointed out.
The United States’ Perseverance rover touched down on Mars in Jezero Crater overnight into Friday and sent several images of the Red Planet to Earth. The main goals of the mission are to figure out if the planet used to be habitable in the past and search for traces of life.
From a technical standpoint, Perseverance is almost entirely similar to NASA’s previous car-sized Mars rover named Curiosity. However, the new vehicle isn’t equipped with a device similar to Russia’s DAN spectrometer, which was installed on Curiosity and played a crucial role in finding traces of water in Gale Crater. According to Ivanov, the absence of such a device will affect the rover’s activities but won’t hinder efforts to find signs of previous life on Martian soil.
"The Russian device installed on Curiosity collected a large amount of data that our researchers are now analyzing. Perseverance carries a ground-penetrating radar that will make it possible to define soil stratigraphy to a depth of up to ten meters," the Russian scientist emphasized.
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