The Perseverance rover crashed into the Red Planet in February 2021 carrying, among other instruments, a weather station called the Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA). This instrument includes two wind sensors that measure speed and direction, among several other sensors that provide weather measurements such as humidity, radiation, and air temperature. Pebbles carried aloft by the Red Planet’s strong gusts recently damaged one of the wind sensors, but MEDA can still monitor the wind at the Jezero Crater landing site, albeit with reduced sensitivity, José Antonio Rodriguez Manfredi told Space , principal investigator of MEDA. com. “Right now, the sensor is reduced in capabilities, but it still provides magnitudes of speed and direction,” Rodriguez Manfredi, a scientist at the Spanish Center for Astrobiology in Madrid, wrote in an e-mail. “The whole team is now re-tuning the recovery process to be more accurate than the undamaged detector readings.” The two roughly ruler-sized wind sensors on Perseverance are flanked by six individual probes that aim to give accurate readings from any direction, according to materials (opens in new tab) from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, which manages the rover. Each of the two main wind sensors is attached to a boom that can be deployed to move the sensors away from the rover as it drives, because the size of the Perseverance rover affects wind currents with its own motions through Mars’ thin atmosphere, they said. JPL officials. .
The Perseverance rover deploys one of its wind sensors on the Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA) during exercises on Earth in 2019. (Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech) Like all instruments on the Perseverance, the wind sensor was designed with redundancy and protection in mind, Rodriguez Manfredi noted. “But of course, there’s a limit to everything.” And for an instrument like MEDA, the limit is more difficult, since the sensors have to be exposed to the environmental conditions to record the wind parameters. But when stronger-than-expected winds kicked up larger-than-expected pebbles, the combination resulted in damage to some of the probe’s components. “Neither the forecasts nor the experience we had from previous missions predicted such strong winds, nor such loose material of this nature,” Rodriguez Manfredi said. (He is also the principal investigator of another temperature and wind sensor on NASA’s InSight lander on the Red Planet since November 2018 and is expected to finish its mission this year.) He added that it was ironic that the sensors were damaged by the wind or “exactly what we were looking for.” Perseverance landed on Mars on February 18, 2021 and, along with a helicopter called Ingenuity, is exploring an ancient river delta that may have been rich in microbes billions of years ago. In addition to measuring wind, weather and rock composition, the rover is collecting the most promising material to secretly store for a future return sample mission aimed at sending samples back to Earth in the 2030s. Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace (opens in new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or Facebook.
