By Mary O’KEEFE

It seems as if only yesterday the Mars 2020 mission, with the Perseverance rover in tow, launched from Florida. But the rover has been on the red planet a little over a year now and the future is still full of new experiments and new discoveries ­– and collecting more Mars rocks to bring home.

Perseverance has had an impressive first year that included collecting Martian rocks that will be stored and eventually bought back to Earth as part of a future mission. It saw the test of the first fights of a helicopter on Mars and tested MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment), which is the first prototype oxygen generator on Mars.

It also drove quite a distance – about 1,050 feet – on Feb. 14. That’s a record for the most distance driven by a Mars rover, according to Jet Propulsion Laboratory/NASA.

Where the rover will go and what it will study is a process that involves scientists and engineers.

“We are constantly reevaluating what samples we are interested in,” said Rachel Kronyak, systems engineer at JPL. “We change our minds a little bit and we have to modify the targets; it’s a process.”

Kronyak works with the science operation team as a liaison between scientists and engineers as they build activity plans.

The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is for 1.5 Martian years, which is three Earth years. The plan during the mission is to collect 20 rock core samples.

“So far we have six, which is impressive for our first year,” Kronyak said.

It’s impressive because of everything that had to be done during this first, very busy, year. For example, once it landed, engineers had to check every aspect of every instrument on the rover making certain it would operate successfully on Mars.

The gathering of rock core samples is one of the highest priorities of the mission, and one of the most complex operations. The sample rocks are being held and then will be left for pickup by the proposed Mars Sample Return mission. There will be a lot of work that will have to be done prior to that mission, including how to store and examine the rocks once they get back to Earth.

“It is a very collaborative [process] we have been thinking about since way before the [rover] landed and we were looking at a landing site,” she said.

Jezero Crater was chosen for the landing destination and the rover has been working on the crater floor for the last year. The rover’s move to the next location was decided after long discussions between the scientists and engineers. They set different levels of operations processes from long-term to short-term, from what they will be doing in the next few months to what they are doing the next day.

“Of course things can always change, so we are flexible but that’s why we have these [processes] in place. Mission operations have these conversations on a higher level and go down to a little bit more detailed and [even] more detailed. There are a lot of negotiations and a lot of discussions that are happening along the way,” she said. “It’s a lot to handle but it’s a team effort for everybody.”

Kronyak never takes for granted the fact that she is on a Mars mission.

“It is something that I always have to remind myself about,” she said. “This is a pretty incredible thing we get to do every single day and it is really humbling to [be part of] something like this. We really appreciate the times when we are on a shift and we see new pictures coming down from Mars. We do get into the daily habit and just expect it, but I try to step back and say, ‘Wow.’ We are part of a very small group of humans that get to see these images form Mars for the very first time. This is a brand new place, and there is nothing that can compare to that.

“It’s pretty awesome.”