Half a Decade of Mars Exploration: NASA’s Perseverance Rover

JPL

NASA’s Perseverance rover is coming up on the five-year mark for Red Planet exploration and will soon eclipse Opportunity’s record for the longest distance driven by a roving vehicle. The briefing will chronicle both new engineering and science results. Steve Lee will provide an update on the rover’s status and future plans. Steve will also chronicle a paper published that week in IEEE Transactions on Field Robotics on Perseverance ENAV and how the rover team’s continued refinement of its ENAV could benefit future Moon and Mars missions. M2020 scientist Ken Williford will cover the results from a paper published the week of AGU in Science, titled “Carbonated ultramafic igneous rocks in Jezero crater, Mars” (which documents geologic discoveries in Jezero Crater’s Margin Unit). Finally, Mars 2020 scientist Briony Horgan will review science discoveries on the crater rim so far—she’s giving a talk on that subject at AGU. She will also cover the science team’s plans for the rover’s next geologic area of interest—Lac de Charmes (where the rover is expected to roll up to the week of AGU).

Panel:

Steve Lee, M2020 deputy project manager, JPL
Ken Williford, M2020 scientist, Blue Marble Space Institute
Briony Horgan, M2020 scientist, Purdue

Contact: DC Agle, JPL, agle@jpl.nasa.gov