PROFESSOR DESCRIBES WHAT IS DIFFERENT ABOUT THIS MISSION
Jim Bell, a professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, has worked on a number of Mars missions.
He is the primary investigator leading a team in charge of one of the camera systems on Perseverance – and he has described what makes this Mars mission so special.
He told podcast The Conversation Weekly: “Perseverance is intended to be the first part of a robotic sample-return mission from Mars.
“So instead of just drilling into the surface like the Curiosity Rover does, Perseverance will drill and core into the surface and cache those little cores into tubes about the size of a dry-erase marker.
“It will then put those tubes onto the surface for a future mission later this decade to pick up and then bring back to the Earth.”
