Missions to Mars prior to the year 2020 have indicated that Mars once held liquid water. This may have provided an environment suitable for the existence of microbial life. The primary science mission of Mars 2020 is to explore the past habitability of Mars and to prepare and cache a set of samples for potential return to Earth by a future mission. A second mission of Mars 2020 is to demonstrate technologies that can be used for human exploration of Mars. The mission duration of Mars 2020 is 1 Mars year, 668 sols or 1.88 Earth years. To fulfill the mission of Mars 2020, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) chose to send a rover, Perseverence, to the surface of Mars. Perseverance is the latest and most sophisticated Mars rover from NASA. It was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida on July 30, 20201. After a cruise of approximately five and one-half months, it was successfully delivered to Jezero Crater on the surface of Mars on February 18, 2021. The pictures and video of its delivery were viewed with anticipation and awe around the world. However, some of us waited with equal anticipation for another moment, the posting of the first Mastcam-Z images. The Mars 2020 rover, Perseverance, includes 25 cameras, including 2 on the helicopter Ingenuity. There are 16 engineering cameras and 7 science cameras. Two of the science cameras enable the first-ever color imaging in stereo at variable magnification. These two cameras are the Mastcam-Z cameras, which are both mounted on the Remote Sensing Mast, separated by approximately 244 mm. The two Mastcam-Z cameras each make use of the first zoom lenses in interplanetary or deep space applications, which is the reason for the “Z” in the name of the camera (Mast Camera Zoom). In addition to their zoom capability, the lenses can be focused over a broad range of object distances. The optical design of these lenses is interesting in its development and deployment.
The Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) narrow angle system is a 3.5 m focal length camera that has operated for the last five years as part of the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mission. Folded into a total package (including electronics) of less than 1 m length and weighing just over 20 kg, MOC's Ritchey-Chretien optical design is extremely sensitive to primary-to-secondary despace. Because of this, providing proper focus over the range of operational conditions was the primary challenge of the MOC development effort. As initially proposed, the instrument used a graphite-epoxy metering structure to provide a completely athermal system. Given of the sensitivity of the design and large operational temperature range, this turned out not to be realizable. The first fallback from a completely athermal design was to model the response of the system over temperature, and set the detector so the system would be focus over the range of operational conditions. Prototype testing revealed this was also not a workable solution. Late in the development flow, the system was retrofitted with a set of heaters to control focus in flight by application of radial thermal gradients across the primary mirror. Despite the loss of the first copy of the MOC on Mars Observer in 1993, the MOC on MGS has been an outstanding success, returning over 140,000 images of Mars to date and making a number of new discoveries about the planet.
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