LPL Newsletter for March 2021
Monday, March 1, 2021
In LPL news this month, it's time for spacecraft to say goodbye and hello. After the successful sampling campaign last fall, OSIRIS-REx is preparing for its farewell tour at Bennu. Meanwhile, HiRISE took some of its now-expected spectacular images to welcome the Perseverance rover to Mars, including an image of Perseverance under parachute, and another of the rover on the ground, with the traces of the entry, descent, and landing system around it. We also have two stories about faculty leading teams working to build new capabilities—Dániel Apai leading a group building the capability to directly image extrasolar planets and Christopher Hamilton leading a project in Iceland to investigate ways to use unmanned aerial vehicles in conjunction with a rover.
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HiRISE Images the NASA Rover Perseverance on its Descent to the Martian Surface
The Mars 2020 descent stage holding NASA’s Perseverance rover can be seen falling through the Martian atmosphere, its parachute trailing behind.
OSIRIS-REx to Fly a Farewell Tour of Bennu
The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will swoop around Bennu one more time to collect information about how the Touch-and-Go sample collection affected the asteroid before returning home.
A New Way to Look for Life-Sustaining Planets
New capabilities developed by an international team of astronomers make it possible to directly image planets that could potentially harbor life within the habitable zone of a neighboring star system.
Watch Flight of the RAVEN
Christopher Hamilton is spearheading the RAVEN Project, a NASA-funded endeavor to develop the next generation of drones capable of exploring alien worlds like Mars. The project is currently testing prototypes over the Mars-like volcanic terrain of Iceland, and will follow in the footsteps of the Mars 2020 Mission.