‘Find the Wind’ Mars, NASA’s Perseverance is Hit by Pebbles carried away by the wind

Jakarta, CNN Indonesia —

Robot US Aerospace and Space Administration (NASA) explorer Perseverance damaged after being hit by pebbles carried by strong winds on Mars. Can he still operate?

Space reports that the $2.7 billion rover landed on the Red Planet in February 2021 with one of them carrying a weather station dubbed the Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA).

The instrument includes two wind sensors that measure speed and direction, among several other sensors that provide weather metrics such as humidity, radiation and air temperature.

After being hit by Martian pebbles, MEDA in Perseverance was still able to track the wind in its landing area at Jezero Crater. However, according to José Antonio Rodriguez Manfredi, MEDA principal investigator, the sensitivity has decreased.

“Currently, the sensor is reduced in capability, but still provides a magnitude of speed and direction,” wrote Rodriguez Manfredi, a scientist at the Spanish Center for Astrobiology in Madrid. Space.

“The entire team is now resetting the retrieval procedure to get even more accuracy from the undamaged detector readings.”

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, which is central to Perseverance’s management, said the two ruler-sized wind sensors were surrounded by six individual detectors aimed at providing accurate readings from all directions.

Each of the two main installed wind sensors can be opened to move the sensor away from the direction of the rover’s speed. The reason is that the car-sized Perseverance can affect wind currents by moving itself through the thin Martian atmosphere.

Like all instruments in Perseverance, the wind sensor is designed with redundancy and protection in mind. “But of course, there are limits to everything,” said Manfredi.

For an instrument like MEDA, the boundaries are said to be more challenging. This is because the sensor must be exposed to environmental conditions to record wind parameters.

The combination of stronger-than-expected winds and the larger gravel being carried in the air resulted in damage to several detector elements.

“Neither the predictions nor the experience we have from previous missions predicted such strong winds, or loose material as they did,” Manfredi said.

According to him, it would be ironic if the MEDA sensor in Perseverance was damaged by the wind. In fact, the wind speed is what researchers are actually looking for.

In addition to measuring wind, weather and rock composition, the rover picks up the most promising materials to retrieve and hide and return in the future aiming to send samples to Earth in the 2030s.

Previously, NASA said Perseverance’s left front wheel accidentally picked up a rock on February 4, 2022, or the 341st day on Mars. The rock is periodically depicted in a photobomb taken by the Hazard Avoidance Camera (Hazcam) front left.

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