The Perseverance rover
The Perseverance rover
The Mars 2020 Perseverance rover will use its robotic arm to examine rocks on Mars. The six-wheeled vehicle, the size of a small car and weighing just over 1000 kilograms, has a total of seven instruments and 23 cameras on board. On its two-metre-high mast is, among other instruments, Mastcam-Z, a panoramic camera with stereoscopic and zoom functions, whose science team includes researchers from the German Aerospace Center (DLR). On the arm of the rover is a famous detective duo – SHERLOC and WATSON. SHERLOC is a UV Raman spectrometer with an ultraviolet laser, which can, among other things, detect organic compounds non-destructively from a distance. WATSON is a high-resolution colour camera for microscope images.
