:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/67127035/PIA23720.0.png "First 'Human-Made' Helicopter Heads To Mars")
NASA's Perseverance rover is headed to Mars and will land on Feb. 18, 2021, at 3:40 p.m. Eastern time. The Perseverance rovers aim at answering questions that have nagged humanity for long; The presence of life on our neighbouring planet. According to NASA, Perseverance’s biggest goal is to look for signs of life on Mars and dig up samples of dirt that could one day be returned to Earth for study.
The Perseverance rover has become the third and final spacecraft to head that way this month after the Emirates Mars Mission successfully lifted off on a Japanese rocket on July 20 and the Chinese second mission, Tianwen-1, on July 23.
NASA's Perseverance rover lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida on Thursday at 7:50 a.m. Eastern time. The rover’s target: Jezero Crater, the site of an ancient crater lake and an erstwhile river delta that the rover will scour for signs of past Martian life.
The $2.4-billion Perseverance vehicle en route to Mars is a robotic wheeled vehicle. It is as big as a car and was designed to look for habitable environments, and search for evidence of past life. Perseverance is carrying several cameras, which will record various views as the spacecraft zooms through the atmosphere en route to landing, two microphones, which will be the first to record sounds on another planet and an experimental helicopter, weighing about four-pound called the "Marscopter".
The Marscopter is a technology experiment, and if it works, it will be the first powered flight on another planet. The rotors have to spin at 2,4000 revolutions a minute to generate lift in the thin atmosphere of Mars, just one per cent as dense at Earth’s at the surface.
