LOS ANGELES – When NASA’s Perseverance to Mars rover, a robotic astrobiology lab packed inside a space capsule, reaches the final stretch of its seven-month journey from Earth this week, it is scheduled to issue an alert of radio when it enters the fine Martian atmosphere. .
By the time this signal reaches mission managers about 127 million miles away at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) near Los Angeles, Perseverance will have already landed on the red planet, hopefully.
The six-wheeled rover is expected to take seven minutes to descend from the top of the Martian atmosphere to the planet’s surface in less time than the more than 11-minute radio transmission to Earth. Therefore, Thursday’s final self-guided descent from the Rover spacecraft will occur during a white wedding interval that JPL engineers affectionately call the “seven minutes of terror”.
Al Chen, head of the JPL landing and landing team, called it the most critical and dangerous part of the $ 2.7 billion mission.
“Success is never assured,” Chen said in a recent report. “And that’s especially true when we’re trying to land the biggest, heavy, complicated rover we’ve built to the most dangerous place we’ve ever tried to land.”
It is relying heavily on the result. Based on the discoveries of nearly 20 U.S. trips to Mars dating back to the 1965 Mariner 4 flyby, perseverance can pave the way for scientists to conclusively prove whether life has existed beyond Earth. while paving the way for eventual human missions to the fourth planet from the sun. A safe landing, as always, is the first.
Success will depend on a complex sequence of smoothly unfolding events, from the inflation of a giant supersonic parachute to the deployment of a lightning-powered “sky crane” that will descend to a safe landing point. and will be placed above the surface as the rover lowers to the ground on a ligature.
“Perseverance has to do it all by itself,” Chen said. “We can’t avoid it during this period.”
If all goes as planned, the NASA team would receive a follow-up radio signal shortly before 1 p.m., Pacific time, confirming that perseverance landed on Martian land on the edge of an ancient delta. river and missing lake bed.
Science on the surface
From here, the nuclear-powered rover, about the size of a small SUV, will embark on the main goal of its two-year mission: to hire a complex set of instruments in search of signs. of microbial life that may have flourished on Mars billions of years ago.
Advanced power tools will drill samples of Martian rock and seal them in cigarette-sized tubes to eventually return to Earth for analysis, the first such specimens collected by humanity from the surface of another planet.
Two future missions to retrieve these samples and return them to Earth are being planned by NASA, in collaboration with the European Space Agency.
Perseverance, the fifth and most sophisticated rover vehicle that NASA has sent to Mars since Sojourner in 1997, also incorporates several pioneering features that are not directly related to astrobiology.
Among them is a small helicopter with a drone, nicknamed Ingenuity, which will test surface motorized flight in another world for the first time. If successful, the four-pound (1.8 kg) bird could pave the way for low-altitude aerial surveillance of Mars during subsequent missions.
Another experiment is a device to extract pure oxygen from carbon dioxide into the Martian atmosphere, a tool that could be invaluable for future support for human life on Mars and for the production of rocket propellant to make astronauts fly to Mars. house.
“Spectacular but treacherous”
The first obstacle of the mission after a flight of 293 million miles from Earth is delivering the rover intact to the ground of Jerez crater, a 28-kilometer-wide extension that scientists believe may house a rich group of fossilized microorganisms.
“It’s a spectacular landing site,” project scientists Ken Farley told reporters by teleconference.
What makes the rugged terrain of the crater, deeply sculpted by the missing liquid water flows, is so seductive as a place of research also makes it treacherous as a landing area.
The descent sequence, an update to NASA’s last rover mission in 2012, begins when Perseverance, embedded in a protective shell, traverses the Martian atmosphere at 12,000 miles per hour, nearly 16 times the speed of sound on Earth. .
After a parachute deployment to slow down its passage, the thermal shield of the descent capsule is expected to fall to release a lightning-powered “crane sky” hovercraft with the rover attached to its belly.
Once the parachute is abandoned, the propellers of the sky crane are fired immediately, reducing the speed of its descent as it approaches the ground of the crater and is automatically navigated to a soft landing site, moving away. of pebbles, cliffs and sand dunes.
Located on the surface, the sky crane is due to a lower perseverance on the nylon ties, breaks the chords when the rover’s wheels reach the surface and then flies to crash at a safe distance.
In case it all worked out, Deputy Project Director Matthew Wallace said the post-landing exuberance would be on full screen at JPL despite COVID-19 security protocols that have maintained close contacts within the control of the mission to a minimum.
“I don’t think COVID can stop us from jumping up and down and up,” Wallace said.