NASA's Mars 2020 Mission Drops in on Death Valley
Flight tests of the Mars 2020 Lander Vision System, which will help guide NASA's next Mars mission to a safe touchdown on the Red Planet, are taking place in the California desert.
On
a test flight in Death Valley, California, an Airbus helicopter carried an engineering model of the
Lander Vision System (LVS) that will help guide NASA's next Mars mission to a
safe touchdown on the Red Planet. During the flight - one in a series - the helicopter (which is not part of the mission and was
used just for testing) and its two-person crew flew a pre-planned
sequence of maneuvers while LVS collected and analyzed imagery of the barren,
mountainous terrain below.LVS
is an integral part of a guidance system called Terrain-Relative Navigation
(TRN) that will steer NASA's Mars 2020 rover away from hazardous areas during
its final descent to Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021.Mars
2020 will be the first spacecraft in the history of planetary exploration with
the ability to accurately retarget its point of touchdown during the landing
sequence. Also among the firsts of the mission, the 2020 rover carries a
sample-caching system that will collect samples of Martian rock and soil and
store them on the surface of the planet for retrieval and return to Earth by subsequent
missions.Mars
2020 will launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida in July of
2020.JPL is building and will manage operations of the Mars 2020
rover for the NASA Science Mission Directorate at the agency's headquarters in
Washington.If you want to send your
name to Mars with NASA's 2020 mission you can do so from now until Sept. 30,
2019. Add your name to the list and obtain a souvenir boarding pass to Mars
here:https://go.nasa.gov/Mars2020PassFor more information about the mission, go
to:https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/