Thursday afternoon, Perseverance, NASA’s most ambitious engine, will attempt to land on Mars with more challenges. Perseverance carries out a series of scientific experiments that will look for signs of life, launch a drone helicopter and record the audio of the planet for the first time. But conducting these experiments is based solely on whether “Percy” can hold the landing.
“I just want to say that landing on Mars is difficult,” says Gregorio Villar, systems engineer for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory entry, landing, and landing equipment. Historically, about half of the Mars landings attempted by the United States have failed, and perseverance will be the biggest engine that will attempt it. The location also complicates matters: the rover points to the Jezero crater, a dry remnant of what scientists believe was a river delta 3.5 billion years ago. “Normally, we try to go to safe places, such as very flat areas that aren’t too scary,” Villar says. “But then it’s a little boring for scientists, isn’t it?”
Perseverance was launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on July 30, but its journey actually began about a decade ago. “There are literally thousands of people over the age of ten who worked on it,” Villar says. The new technology aboard the ship was designed to make challenging landings as realistic and Mars missions as intriguing as possible.
This mission focuses mainly on the search for ancient traces of life. Once in the crater, Perseverance will use tools such as the Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry to examine soil textures to find patterns that indicate past microbial activity. The autonomous rover is equipped with a first microphone, in addition to 23 cameras, including the SuperCam, a laser and camera configuration that will analyze the chemical composition of dust and Martian minerals, which can reveal traces of life long ago time.
The rover also carries technologies unrelated to the search for aliens. The craft, a small helicopter aboard Perseverance, will make the first controlled flight to another planet: a Wright Brothers moment for JPL. And the experiments get energy from a battery that is continuously recharged with U.S.-made plutonium fuel.
Since July, as perseverance has been crossing over to Mars, numerous antennas on board have been sending high-frequency signals to Earth engineers. An X-band signal has transmitted a kind of “heartbeat” throughout the rover’s journey. “Every certain amount of seconds, you’ll be told,‘ Okay, I’m still fine, I’m still fine, ’” Villar says.
Separate high-frequency signals in the megahertz range can also transmit heavier files, such as images from Perseverance’s built-in cameras. The rover will communicate with satellites orbiting the red planet and these will transmit their signals to Earth. (NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the Maven satellite and its NASA cousins have a new company: the UAE’s Hope mission recently positioned a spacecraft in orbit, which has sent its first images). These communication channels will continue to ping NASA into landing day.
But even with all the cameras and the microphone, don’t expect instant video. These large files will take some time to transmit. Even rudimentary communications like the “heartbeat tone” take 11 minutes and 22 seconds to reach Earth at this time of year. This delay means that NASA engineers will not have real-time communication with the vessel during the infamous “seven minutes of terror,” when they must survive its descent through the Martian atmosphere and land autonomously.
You can follow the news of the mission control on the public channel of NASA TV, in the NASA application, on YouTube, Twitterand Facebook. NASA’s official TV broadcast will begin at 2:15 pm EST on Thursday, February 18th.