NASA’s Perseverance Rover successfully lands on the surface

NASA successfully landed the fifth robotic rover on Mars on Thursday, the US space agency confirming that Perseverance has safely reached the surface of the red planet.

“Touchdown confirmed,” said NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory mission control. “Perseverance safely on the surface of Mars, ready to begin searching for the sands of past life.”

The rover is the most advanced technological robot that NASA has ever sent to Mars, the agency aiming to spend almost two years exploring the surface. The agency spent about $ 2.4 billion building and launching the Perseverance mission, with other costs of $ 300 million expected to land and operate the rover on the surface of Mars.

Based on its predecessor Curiosity, which arrived on Mars in August 2012 and is still in operation, the Perseverance rover was built by NASA’s JPL in California. Several companies have contributed to parts of the spacecraft, such as the heat shield built by Lockheed Martin, the rocket propellants built by Aerojet Rocketdyne and the robotic arm built by Maxar Technologies.

Perseverance also carries a small helicopter called the Ingenuity, which NASA intends to use to try its first flight to another planet.

The rover is the size of a small car, weighs about a ton in total, and is 10 feet long by nine feet wide and seven feet high. It has a robotic arm that reaches about seven meters in length, the end of which has a robotic “hand” that has a camera, a chemical analyzer and a stone drill. Perseverance is nuclear powered by a plutonium generator provided by the US Department of Energy to generate electricity for its pair of lithium-ion batteries.

Perseverance traveled 293 million miles to reach Mars more than six months after the launch of a United Launch Alliance Atlas V missile on July 30.

The landing of the rover featured typical “seven minutes of terror” that NASA engineers describe for any attempt by the spacecraft to reach the Martian surface. This is the time required to enter the Martian atmosphere and descend to the surface and is called as such because it takes 11 minutes for any communication to travel from the rover back to Earth – which means that the delay requires the spacecraft and the rover to perform landing autonomously.

Perseverance penetrated the Martian atmosphere into a capsule that protected the rover as it traveled at about 12,100 miles per hour. The spacecraft then deployed a parachute to begin slowing down before dropping the capsule and heat shield, and then launched rocket propellers to slow down from about 170 miles per hour to about two miles per hour.

The spacecraft deployed its “sky crane”, which lowered the rover with a few feet left to the surface.

Perseverance landed in Jezero Crater, a 28-mile-wide basin in the northern hemisphere of Mars. It’s a place where NASA thinks a body of water the size of Lake Tahoe was flowing. NASA’s scientific team hopes that the ancient delta of the river could have preserved organic molecules and other potential signs of microbial life, which Perseverance will try to detect with its instruments.

In addition to its scientific tools, the rover also bears a commemorative plaque to honor COVID-19 health workers and pay tribute to the impact of the pandemic.

The rover also has the names of 10.9 million people inscribed in three silicon chips on the rover, with the words “Explore as one” written in Morse code.

The rover is full of cameras to capture its expedition, with the robot full of scientific instruments to measure the geology of the planet – and we hope to collect samples that NASA aims to return to Earth one day.

NASA intends to drive perseverance around the surface for a Martian year, which is the equivalent of 687 days on Earth.

It has seven major instruments for a wide range of purposes: Mastcam-Z, Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA), Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE), Planetary Instrument for X-ray Rithochemistry (PIXL), Radar Imager for Experiment underground of Mars (RIMFAX), scanning of living environments with Raman and luminescence for organic and chemical products (SHERLOC) and SuperCam.

The rover also has a sample storage system, which has nine different drills and a series of sample collection tubes to capture pieces of the surface of Mars for a possible return to Earth.

“Perseverance is the first rover to bring a sample storage system to Mars that will pack promising evidence for its return to Earth through a future mission,” NASA said in a press release. “Instead of spraying the rock as Curiosity drills do, the Perseverance drill will cut intact rock cores that are the size of a piece of chalk and place them in sample tubes that it will store until the rover reaches a suitable location. of Mars. “

NASA hopes to return the sample as part of a campaign in partnership with the European Space Agency in the future.

The rover is designed to cover more ground than any other robot sent to Mars before. NASA designed Perseverance to drive an average of 650 feet per Martian day, which is close to the longest trip previously made in a day at 702 feet by NASA’s Opportunity rover.

Perseverance also carries the helicopter of ingenuity. A few months after landing, NASA plans to deploy the helicopter under Perseverance in a flat area. The rover will then drive about 30 meters away to capture the flight attempt with the rover’s cameras.

If all goes well, the Ingenuity flight will be the first motor-controlled flight on another planet, in what NASA describes as “a Wright Brothers moment” on Mars.

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