Thursday afternoon, Perseverance, NASA’s most ambitious self-driving rover, will attempt to land the most challenging agency on Mars. Perseverance carries a series of scientific experiments that will look for signs of life, launch a drone helicopter and record the sound of the planet for the first time. But the conduct of these experiments is based exclusively on whether “Percy” can stick to the landing.
“I just want to say that landing on Mars is difficult,” says Gregorio Villar, a systems engineer with the entry, landing and landing team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Historically, about half of the US landings attempted on Mars have failed, and Perseverance will be the largest rover to attempt it. The location also complicates things: the rover targets the Jezero crater, a dry remnant of what scientists believe was a river delta 3.5 billion years ago. “Usually we try to go to safe places, such as very flat areas, which are not too scary,” says Villar. “But then it’s kind of boring for scientists, isn’t it?”
Perseverance was launched from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on July 30, but its journey really began about a decade ago. “There are literally thousands of people over the age of 10 who have worked on this,” says Villar. The new technology aboard the ship has been designed to make challenging landings more realistic – and for more exciting missions to Mars.
This mission focuses mainly on finding the 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 identify patterns that indicate past microbial activity. The self-driving rover is equipped with a microphone for the first time, plus 23 cameras, including SuperCam, a laser and camera setup that will analyze the chemical structure of Martian dust and minerals, potentially revealing traces of long-ago life.
The rover also carries technologies unrelated to the search for aliens. Ingeniousness, a small helicopter aboard Perseverance, will make its first controlled flight to another planet – a key moment for Wright Brothers for JPL. And the experiments get energy from a battery that is continuously recharged with US-made plutonium fuel.
From July, as Perseverance heads for Mars, the many antennas on board send high-frequency signals to engineers back on Earth. An X-band signal sent a kind of “heartbeat” during the rover’s journey. “Every second, it’ll be like, ‘OK, I’m still good, I’m still good,'” says Villar.
Separate high-frequency signals in the megahertz range can also transmit heavier files, such as images from Perseverance dashboards. The rover will communicate with satellites orbiting the Red Planet, and they will send signals back to Earth. (NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Maven Satellite and their NASA cousins have a new company: the UAE’s Hope Mission recently placed an orbiting probe, which sent back its first images.) landing day.
But even with all the cameras and the microphone, don’t expect instant video streaming. These large files will take some time to be transmitted. Even rudimentary communications, such as “heartbeat,” 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 spacecraft during the infamous “seven minutes of terror,” when it must survive its descent through the Martian atmosphere and land autonomously.
You will be able to watch the mission control news on the public channel NASA TV, the NASA application, YouTube, Twitterand Facebook. The official NASA TV stream will begin at 2:15 p.m. EST on Thursday, February 18th.