(July 28) Watch live as NASA holds a briefing on “Mission Tech and Humans to Mars” on July 28, 2020, at 4:00 pm ET in Cape Canaveral, Florida, in connection with the upcoming launch of Mars Perseverance, which is scheduled for July 30.
Participants include: Jeff Sheehy, chief engineer, NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, Jim Watzin, NASA Mars Exploration Program director, Michael Hecht, MOXIE principal investigator, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MiMi Aung, Ingenuity Mars Helicopter project manager, JPL
Amy Ross, lead spacesuit engineer NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Michelle Rucker, Mars Integration Group lead, NASA’s Johnson Space Center.
NASA is preparing to send the first woman and next man to the Moon, part of a larger strategy to send the first astronauts to the surface of Mars. But before they get there, they’ll be faced with a critical question: What should they wear on Mars, where the thin atmosphere allows more radiation from the Sun and cosmic rays to reach the ground?
Amy Ross is looking for answers. An advanced spacesuit designer at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, she’s developing new suits for the Moon and Mars. So Ross is eagerly awaiting this summer’s launch of the Perseverance Mars rover, which will carry the first samples of spacesuit material ever sent to the Red Planet.
While the rover explores Jezero Crater, collecting rock and soil samples for future return to Earth, five small pieces of spacesuit material will be studied by an instrument aboard Perseverance called SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals). The materials, including a piece of helmet visor, are embedded alongside a fragment of a Martian meteorite in SHERLOC’s calibration target. That’s what scientists use to make sure an instrument’s settings are correct, comparing readings on Mars to base-level readings they got on Earth.
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