NASAs Mars Exploration takes center stage in Huntsville

NASA’s Mars Exploration takes center stage in Huntsville

In an exciting development for space enthusiasts, a new exhibit featuring one-of-a-kind models of the Mars rover Perseverance, the Ingenuity Helicopter, and the Mars Ascent Vehicle have officially touched down at Huntsville’s U.S. Space and Rocket Center (USSRC).

The exhibit is titled “Roving with Perseverance” and it marks a thrilling opportunity for the public to delve into the extraordinary history of the famous rover along with the rest of the Mars 2020 mission. Members of the 2020 Perseverance Mission Team are poised to be part of the engagement.

“We’re excited to be telling the story of current Mars exploration and looking to the future with our Mars Sample Return campaign,” shared Mars Program Public Engagement Specialist Sarah Marcotte. 

“Perseverance is the first leg of the Mars sample return campaign. Perseverance has collected 20 samples from the surface so far, and hopes to collect at least another 10.  In the future, we would like to bring those samples back from her,” Marcotte explained.

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According to Marcotte, part of the new exhibit is also dedicated to how Huntsville will play a role in getting these samples back.

She then gestured towards a third model, the Mars Ascension Vehicle (MAV), which is  being built in Huntsville, and continued to elaborate. 

“In the future, NASA plans to bring spacecraft to Mars to lift those samples off the Martian surface. So the Mars Ascent Vehicle is the way that the samples would be launched into Mars orbit. There’s a beautiful trailer on our mars.nasa.gov website that will show you how the Mars Ascent Vehicle is catapulted into the air and lights up in the air and goes into Mars orbit. The Mars ascent vehicle is being built here in Huntsville at the Marshall Space Flight Center,” said Marcotte.

The MAV is currently set to launch in June 2028, with the samples set to arrive on Earth in the early 2030s.The MAV launch will be accomplished using two solid rocket motors – SRM1 and SRM2 which were tested in March and April of 2023. According to officials from Marshall Space Flight Center, testing and analysis of the SRM1 showed the team’s ingenuity has proven successful.

“This test demonstrates our nation has the capacity to develop a launch vehicle that can successfully be lightweight enough to get to Mars and robust enough to put a set of samples into orbit to bring back to Earth,” said MAV Propulsion Manager Benjamin Davis at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. “The hardware is telling us that our technology is ready to proceed with development.”

This MAV model makes the Huntsville exhibit unique from the ones hosted in any other city during the model’s roadshow tour and provides a link directly to Huntsville.  

“That’s why we’re so thrilled to be able to come here and this is the first time I’ve displayed this model, it is brand new. We wanted to make sure we had it here for Huntsville, because of the local connection and so the engineers will be able to talk about their baby, what they do and their role in either a subsystem or how it’s going to operate,” said Davis.

The project’s two primary contractors, Lockheed Martin Space and Northrop Grumman, are helping Marshall in the designing, building, and testing of the MAV. Lockheed is the overall system integrator and provides multiple subsystems while Northrop provides the first stage and second stage main propulsion systems.

Over the Labor Day weekend, engineers from the program and other NASA representatives met with the public at the USSRC to celebrate the opening of the exhibit. The USSRC is the only location in the Southeast to host this roadshow, which includes full-size “twin” models of NASA’s Perseverance Rover and the history-making Ingenuity Mars Helicopter. The Rocket Center proudly stands as the first site in the country to receive an enhanced exhibit that includes a model of the Mars Ascent Vehicle.

The “Roving with Perseverance” exhibit offers a unique opportunity for space enthusiasts interested in  Perseverance and Ingenuity which have both been exploring Mars since 2021.  

These lifelike models provide a glimpse of their remarkable journey. Visitors to the exhibit will learn about the rover’s mission along with the significance of Ingenuity,  the helicopter that makes up the other major part of the exhibit. Sarah Marcotte expressed the significance of Ingenuity, stating, “We were able to take this helicopter from being a technology demonstration, ‘How can we fly on Mars?’ and now it’s become a scout for Perseverance.”

After proving flight was possible on Mars, Ingenuity entered an operations demonstration phase in May 2021 to show how aerial scouting could benefit future exploration of Mars and other worlds. Lockheed Space designed and manufactured the Mars Helicopter Delivery System

Beyond the search for evidence of past life, the combined efforts of Perseverance, Ingenuity and the Mars Sample Return missions will help scientists understand its geological history, the evolution of its climate and identify any hazards that could be hazardous to future human explorers.  

The exhibit debuted at the USSRC on September 2, 2023, and it will remain on display until February 29, 2024. Notably, this exhibit exclusively visits museums that are members of the Museum and Information Education Alliance, of which the Space and Rocket Center is one.

One of the scientists responsible for building and operating the vehicles replicated in the exhibit also held a presentation, free to the public, on Saturday night for those who wanted to learn even more.

The INTUITIVE® Planetarium hosted Dr. Stanley Do, a member of the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover Operations Team at JPL, on Saturday at 7 p.m that provided an even deeper exploration of the Martian surface. Dr. Do led a guided tour of the Martian surface using images gathered since Perseverance landed on the Red Planet in February 2021. 

Those interested in the exhibit can reserve tickets for the “Roving with Perseverance” roadshow at rocketcenter.com. Further information about the MAV, Huntsville’s contributions to the Mars Sample Return mission, and how to sign up and have your name ride on the future Mars Sample Return mission is available at mars.nasa.gov.