Running through space at over 12,000 mph, NASA Mars rover perseverance arrived on Mars on Thursday and kicked off an exciting seven-minute dive through the atmosphere land on the surface of the red planet to look for evidence of past microbial life in the remains of an ancient lake.
“The touchdown has been confirmed! Perseverance is safe on the surface of Mars, ready to start looking for signs of past life.” Swati Mohan, an orientation, navigation and control agent who controlled telemetry at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, called when the rover touched down. The flight engineers, excited, if socially distanced, erupted in applause and applause, and anxiety gave way to relief in the joy of the moment.
NASA
The relief was understandable. Often described as “seven minutes of terror,” the rover’s descent was one nail biting sequence of computer-orchestrated manufacturing or breaking events that had to work almost flawlessly to drop the 2,260-pound rover into an ancient bed of Jezero Crater Lake, avoiding dangerous cliffs, large pebbles, and sand dunes.
And the $ 2.4 billion rover did just that.
“I almost feel like I’m in a dream,” said Jennifer Trosper, deputy project director. “Our job is to think about all the bad things that can happen and try to avoid them, and when all the good things happen, you get the feeling you’re dreaming. And I’m happy to feel like you’re dreaming!”
President Biden he tweeted: “Congratulations to NASA and everyone’s hard work has made the historic landing of Perseverance possible.”
The rover reached the top of the discernible Martian atmosphere at 3:48 pm EST and quickly decelerated in an atmospheric friction fire, its protective shield resistant to temperatures of up to 2,700 degrees (hot enough to melt stainless steel) and a braking force of 10 times the force of gravity on Earth.
Slowing to just under 1,000 mph, it deployed a 70.5-foot-wide giant parachute into supersonic current and used an advanced guidance system to identify hazards and select a safe landing point on the supersonic current. floor of the Jezero crater.
Then, less than a minute from the touchdown, at an altitude of about 2.1 miles, Perseverance fell free of his parachute as he descended to about 200 mph. According to later, eight engines from a rocket-propelled backpack fired, causing the spacecraft to drop to less than 2 mph when it reached an expected altitude of just 70 feet or so.
At that point, perseverance was reduced to the surface suspended by the ligatures as the jet pack continued the descent. At 3:55 p.m., the rover’s six wheels were installed on the surface, the ties were cut, and the “sky crane” backpack flew out to crash into a safe distance.
“Hello, world,” “Perseverance” has tweeted “minutes after landing, posting the first image of the rover about its landing site.” My first look at my home forever. “
The Earth fell below the horizon, as seen from Jezero Crater about a minute before the touchdown, cutting off X-band radio signals directly to the Earth of Perseverance. But UHF signals confirming the landing were transmitted to JPL by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which was passing over it.
“The maneuvering of the cranes in the sky has begun. About 20 meters above the surface,” Mohan reported as the rover’s descent neared its conclusion.
“We are still receiving signals from MRO,” one engineer reported
“The touchdown has been confirmed!” Mohan shouted a moment later.
Moments later, the first image of one of the rover’s danger cameras entered, showing a relatively flat surface with no large pebbles or other obstacles in sight. “YES! Wow, wow!” Exclaimed an engineer as the photo appeared on the control room screen.
NASA / JPL-Caltech
The rover’s automated descent seemed to go perfectly, as its flight computer used several cameras, radar, and other sensors to find out exactly where it was in relation to the intended landing target. The rover then adjusted its course as needed to avoid possible dangers that would end the missions.
Perseverance had to pull off the landing on its own because radio signals, moving at 186,000 miles per second, needed more than 11 minutes to cross the 127 million-mile gulf between Earth and Mars. JPL flight engineers could only sit and wait, watching the data flow in 11 minutes after the fact.
And for his relief, seven months later launch from Cape CanaveraAnd an interplanetary cruise covering 293 million miles, NASA’s fifth Mars rover, the first designed specifically to look for signs of past life, was safely on the surface of the red planet.
Jezero Crater was targeted because it once had a 28-mile-wide body of water the size of Lake Tahoe. The ancient lake was fed by a river running through the edge of the crater, depositing sediment in a delta resembling a fan clearly visible from orbit. The rover landed about 1.2 miles southeast of the delta, near the center of its planned 4.8 by 4.1 mile landing footprint.
“We think we’re heading southeast based on the shadows, at about 140 degrees,” Trosper said. “The tilt is flat, it’s about 1.2 degrees. The power system looks good … everything looks fantastic.”
NASA / JPL-Caltech
A robotic geologist on Mars
As no major problems develop, engineers plan to spend about 90 days reviewing the rover’s complex instruments and systems.
During the first month, they also plan to deploy and test a small 80-pound, $ 80 million notebook helicopter called Ingenuity who will attempt the first motorized flight in the air of Mars, a “Wright brothers moment” in another world.
Another experiment will test the feasibility of extracting oxygen from the Martian atmosphere, a technology that could one day help future astronauts produce their own air and rocket fuel.
But the main goal of the mission is to look for signs of past biological activity.
Equipped with a robot arm, a core sampling drill and a set of sophisticated cameras, rock vaporization lasers and other instruments, Perseverance will study the deposits of the lakes, venture through the delta and end up moving away. from the shore of the ancient lake, collecting promising specimens along the way.
The selected rocks and soil will be placed in a complex internal carousel mechanism that will photograph, analyze and load them autonomously into airtight tubes the size of lipsticks. The rover will then deposit or cache the sealed samples on the surface of Mars to await collection.
NASA and the European Space Agency plan to send another rover to Jezero by the end of this decade to collect the samples, load them into a small rocket and launch them into the orbit of Mars, where another spacecraft will will catch for the flight back to Earth.