UH scientists are involved in Mars rover mission

A team of three University of Hawaii scientists was selected in 2014 to develop NASA instruments for the rover called Perseverance, which launched Thursday morning from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a mission to uncover any signs of ancient Martian life.

Perseverance is expected to land on Feb. 18 to embark on a robotic expedition for one Mars year, or about 687 Earth days.

The new rover was built to carry seven sophisticated instruments and pieces of hardware to perform geological assessments on Mars. Among the instruments is an advanced camera system called Mastcam-Z, which will provide panoramic and 3D imaging and zoom ability. Perseverance will also carry a “proof-of-concept technology” called MOXIE that produces oxygen from Mars’ carbon dioxide atmosphere. And an instrument suite called MEDA will provide information about the current weather, climate and the nature of dust in the atmosphere.

Over 200 scientists were involved in the Mars 2020 Perseverance mission, and the three UH scientists played a vital role in operating the rover instruments. Sarah Fagents, a researcher at the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology, is the Mastcam-Z team’s volcanologist. And HIGP researchers Shiv Sharma and Anupam Misra, who are experts in Raman spectroscopy and fluorescence, will work with the SuperCam team to search for indicators that life had possibly existed on Mars.

Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the rover was completed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and delivered to Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., in February.

“Under very restricted working conditions, the fact that it made it to the launchpad and that it launched flawlessly is really an amazing achievement for everyone involved to make this happen,” Fagents said in an interview.

The goal of the mission is to gather rock and sediment samples to seek signs of ancient life on what is known as the red planet.

Perseverance will land in Jezero Crater, the site of an ancient river delta in a once-filled lake. The crater is 28 miles wide on the western edge of the Isidis Planitia, a giant basin north of the Martian equator.

“We know that Mars very long ago had a climate that was much more hospitable than its current cold, dry climate,” Fagents said. “So during that first billion years or so of Mars’ history, there could’ve been a cozy, habitable environment for microbes to form.”

This will be the first rover that’s designed to collect samples and leave them on Mars’ surface. Perseverance has a drill system that would pierce into a rock, then store the sample in a small container. The sample will be left on the surface for future missions to retrieve.

“Knowing what those rocks are leads us to how they were formed and what environment they were formed in,” she said. “So we will understand whether the environment would’ve been habitable, and the key part of that is understanding when and where the water was available.”

Fagents said the next expedition, to retrieve the samples, is in discussion.

Perseverance is carrying 23 cameras — the most cameras in interplanetary mission history. The images of the expedition will be made available to the public.