The rover team continues to check out and implement its healthcare measures.
The Perseverance rover of NASA on the Red Planet is still on track.
The rover team has methodically checked its seven science instruments and various subsystems since the perfect photo attraction on February 18th of Perseverance. As photographs captured by the six-wheel navigational cameras show, for example, Perseverance had only deployed its wind sensor.
The wind sensor is part of the weather station called Perseverance's Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA). At Perseverance's landing site, Jezero Crater floor, a 28-mile-wide (45 km) hole in the earth that was home to an ancient deep lake and river delta, the instrument is used to monitor air temperature, humidity, radiation, dust, and wind.
Perseverance, at the heart of NASA's March 2020 $2.7 billion mission, will pursue signs and collect samples for future returns to the earth, for signs of life within Jezero. But the main science work will not begin right after the rover gets started; the first major job for Perseverance is to search for an airfield to get his small helicopter mate off.
The helicopter was a 4 lb. (1.8 kilograms) in the bowels of Perseverance, a craft named Ingenuity. Ingenuity will be deployed on the airfield and will attempt to fly the first rotorcraft on a world beyond Earth to demonstrate technology that can pave the way to a whole new Mars strategy of exploration.
Ingenuity flights will likely be held this spring, with science and sampling starting earnestly in the summer, members of the mission team said.
But the early days of Perseverance on Mars are not boring. Over 6300 rover photography, many of which are spectacular high-resolution shots taken with the Mastcam-Z camera system of Perseverance have been posted by the rover team already. They can be found here.
The Image of the week voted as the public's favorite.
Sources Sapce.com and NASA
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