Lockheed Martin’s Rocket Will Become First To Launch From Another Planet
NASA announced that Lockheed Martin would be building a first-of-its-kind rocket to bring back to Earth samples from Mars. For the past months, NASA's rover Perseverance has been collecting samples of the Red Planet, knowing that someday a spacecraft would take them back home. NASA has always planned to send a rocket to Mars for the samples, but the Perseverance mission started with no clear vision on how that would happen.
Perseverance is sampling Mars using a drill to extract core samples, an engineering feat never achieved before on another planet. NASA engineers built three unique robots into Perseverance to get the job done. One (the iconic robotic arm) makes the drilling, the other processes samples through a bit carousel, and finally, a tiny one stores the samples.
Related: Huge Dust Storms Just Took NASA's Advanced Mars Lander Offline
NASA awarded Lockheed Martin the contract to construct the first rocket to be launched from another planet, Mars. The rocket known as the Mars Ascent Vehicle MAV is part of a larger multi-spacecraft team on a mission to recollect Perseverance samples and fly them back home. Lockheed Martin now faces the challenge of building a small but endurable rocket that will have to do all kinds of tricks to accomplish its mission.
To recover the samples from Mars, NASA is working with the European Space Agency (ESA). The plan is not simple, but NASA thinks it will work. First, Perseverance will leave the samples contained in tubes on the surface of Mars. Then, a rocket will fire a three-component spacecraft for the Red Planet, a Mars-Earth orbiter, a lander with a sample collector rover and the MAV rocket.
The plan is for the small rover to collect the samples then process them safely inside
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