LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – When NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover, a robotic astrobiology lab packed inside a space capsule, arrives in the final week of its seven-month trip to Earth this week, it is set to issue an alert radio as it slips into the thin Martian atmosphere.
By the time this signal reaches mission managers, 204 million miles away, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) near Los Angeles, Perseverance will have already landed on the Red Planet – hopefully in one piece .
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 11-minute radio transmission plus to Earth. Thus, Thursday’s last self-guided descent of the rover spacecraft is scheduled to take place during a range of white joints, which JPL engineers affectionately refer to as “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 guaranteed,” Chen said in a recent briefing. “And that’s especially true when we’re trying to land the biggest, heaviest and most complicated rover we’ve ever built in the most dangerous site we’ve ever tried to land.”
Many are based on the result. Based on the discoveries of nearly 20 American landings on Mars dating back to the 1965 Mariner 4 flight, Perseverance could put scientists to conclusively show whether life existed beyond Earth as it paves the way. for possible human missions to the fourth planet from the sun. . A safe landing, as always, comes first.
Success will depend on a complex sequence of smoothly running events – from inflating a huge supersonic parachute to deploying a jet “sky crane” that will land in a safe landing position and land above the surface in time. which will lower the rover to the ground on a link.
“Perseverance has to do everything on its own,” Chen said. “We can’t help it during this time.”
If all goes as planned, the NASA team would receive a radio tracking signal shortly before 1 p.m., Pacific time, confirming that Perseverance landed on Martian soil at the edge of the long-lost river and lake delta.
SURFACE SCIENCE
From there, the nuclear-powered rover, about the size of a small SUV, will begin the main goal of its two-year mission – hiring a complex suite of tools to look for signs of microbial life that could have blossomed Mars billions of years ago. .
Advanced electric instruments will drill samples from Martian rock and seal them in cigarette-sized tubes for possible return to Earth for further analysis – the first such specimens ever collected by mankind from the surface of another planet.
Two future missions to take these samples and return them to Earth are in the planning phase by NASA, in collaboration with the European Space Agency.
Perseverance, the fifth and by far the most sophisticated rover vehicle that NASA sent to Mars from 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 Ingeniousness, which will test for the first time the flight powered from the surface to another world. If successful, the 1.8-kilogram (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 in the Martian atmosphere, a tool that could prove invaluable for the future support of human life on Mars and for the production of rocket propellants to fly astronauts home.
“SPECTACULAR” BUT TREACHEROUS
The first obstacle of the mission, after a flight of 472 million km from Earth, delivers the rover intact to the floor of Jerezo Crater, a 28-mile (45 km wide) stretch that scientists believe can house a rich amount of fossilized microorganisms.
“It’s a spectacular landing site,” researcher Ken Farley told reporters in a teleconference.
What makes the rugged terrain of the crater – deeply sculpted by long-lost liquid water streams – so appealing as a research site also makes it treacherous as a landing area.
The descent sequence, an upgrade from NASA’s last rover mission in 2012, begins as Perseverance, wrapped in a protective shell, pierces the Martian atmosphere at 19,300 km per hour, almost 16 times the speed of sound on Earth.
After deploying the parachute to slow down, the heat shield of the lowering capsule is set to fall to release a jet-powered “crane” hovercraft with the rover attached to its belly.
Once the parachute is thrown, the jet cranes of the sky crane will be launched immediately, slowing down at walking speed, as it approaches the floor of the crater and sails to a smooth landing place, avoiding boulders, rocks and sand dunes.
Floating above the surface, the sky crane is due to the lower perseverance on the nylon anchors, breaks the ropes when the rover’s wheels reach the surface, then flies to collapse at a safe distance.
If all goes well, Deputy Project Manager Matthew Wallace said post-landing exuberance will be fully displayed at JPL, despite COVID-19 security protocols that have kept close contacts within the mission control to a minimum.
“I don’t think COVID can stop us from jumping up and down with our fists,” Wallace said.
Report by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Edited by Frank McGurty and Will Dunham