The mini O2 lab sounds awesome. Attempting to create breathable O2 from the CO2 atmosphere. Oh and the copter which will hopefully send us some awesome HD video.
The Perseverance rover will collect samples and leave them behind on the surface for later retrieval, targeting return around 2030 via a different spacecraft
Heh, that's basically the first episode of The Magic School Bus that aired on PBS in 1994. That's the one where Janet is insistent on bringing back a sample from every planet they stop to visit in order to prove that she was there. When they get to Pluto, she's collected so many samples that the kids can't fit on the bus. She refuses to leave Pluto without the samples because otherwise nobody will believe her when she says she visited all 9 planets in the solar system. So Arnold, her cousin, takes off his space helmet on Pluto to show her what would happen if they stay there. Arnold freezes instantly. They then leave all the samples on Pluto and hightail it back to Earth. Arnold survives albeit with a cold and Janet learns that if nobody believes her then that's their problem.
Perseverance has over 40 sample containers which it will fill from locations all around the crater. This will allow a simpler robot to grab those in the future instead of having to collect and deal with sending the payload back to earth with only one robot.
perseverance having a 10 year head start on collecting and analyzing samples on mars, then being able to analyze them on earth later for comparison is a big deal. a craft able to go to mars and return is probably going to be pretty slim on instruments and probably won't be very mobile either. perseverance will likely have to deliver the samples to a stationary craft, but i really have no idea what they have actually planned.
nasa is planning on landing the heaviest object ever on the planet. It will include a small rocket (designed by ESA). the heavy rover/platform will take the soccer-ball sized containter and put it in the rockets nose. The rocket will then launch into orbit to meet a ESA satelite that will flyby Mars, grab the container, and return it to earth.
I'm not a studied space / science person so I hope this question isn't stupid. Is no one worried about something from Mars getting unintentionally unleashed on Earth? It's probably not some violent alien thing like in the 2017 movie Life, but what if it's some microorganism that gets released by accident and causes irreversible damage to humans or other life on Earth? Is it worth the risk to bring the samples back? What will we gain from the samples assuming nothing goes wrong?
Not an expert either, but iirc there are generally strict quarantine guidelines in place for this sort of thing if that's even a remote possibility, which I don't think anybody really considers it to be here anyways. Whatever we bring back is likely to be either a long dead fossil or just some special dirt whose composition suggests life was there once, if we find anything at all. The infinitely more likely scenario is actually contaminating Mars with our germs!
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u/PM_Me_Boobies_n_Stuf Feb 18 '21
Upgraded instruments and hardware plus much improved cameras. It's also the first to collect samples for later return to earth