CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AP) – Spaceships aiming to land on Mars jumped past the planet, burned at the entrance, jumped to the surface and made it descend in the middle of a fierce dust storm just to spit out a single faint gray image before death.
Nearly 50 years after the first victim on Mars, NASA is trying the hardest Martian touchdown so far.
The rover called Perseverance heading to a compact 8-mile, 6.4-mile patch on the edge of an ancient river delta on Thursday. It is full of rocks, potholes, sand dunes and rock fields, any of which could condemn the $ 3 billion mission. Once submerged, the land could also hold evidence of past life, all the more reason to collect evidence at this site for return to Earth in 10 years.
While NASA has done everything possible to ensure success, “there is always this fear that it will not work well, it will not work well,” said Erisa Stilley, a landing team engineer, on Tuesday. “I’ve had a pretty good series of successful missions recently and you never want to be the next one that isn’t. It’s heartbreaking when it happens. ”
A look at NASA’s latest mission:
MARS MASTER
NASA has completed eight of the nine landing attempts, making the United States the only country that has managed to achieve a successful touchdown. China hopes to become a second nation in late spring with its own life-seeking rover; His spacecraft entered orbit around Mars last week along with a spacecraft from the United Arab Emirates. The extremely thin atmosphere of the red planet makes it difficult to descend safely. Russia has accumulated the most landing losses on Mars and the moon Phobos since the early 1970s. The European Space Agency has also tried and failed. Two NASA landers are still humming: the Curiosity 2012 rover and the 2018 InSight. Launched in July last year, Perseverance will descend about 3,200 kilometers to Jezero crater, parachuting, rocket engines and a crane. Millions of lines of software code and hundreds of thousands of electrical parts need to work accurately. “There is no return. There are no retries, “Deputy Project Director Matt Wallace said on Wednesday.
THE BEST CLEANING
NASA has equipped the 1-ton Perseverance – a more curious version of Curiosity – with the latest landing technology to achieve this touchdown. A new autopilot tool will calculate the distance of the descending rover to the target location and will release the massive parachute at the precise moment. Then another system will scan the surface, comparing the observations with the on-board maps. The rover could bypass up to 600 meters while looking somewhere safe, in the style of Neil Armstrong. Without these devices, Jezero Crater would be too risky to try. Once lowered, Perseverance with six wheels should be the best driver Mars has ever seen, with more autonomy and autonomy than Curiosity. “Percy has received a new set of blows,” explained chief engineer Adam Steltzner, “and she is ready for trouble on this Martian surface with her new wheels.”
LOOKING FOR SIGNS OF LIFE
Where there was water, there may have been life. That’s why NASA wants Perseverance to spy around Jezero Crater, once home to a river-fed lake. It is now dry with bones, but 3.5 billion years ago, this Martian lake was as big and wet as Nevada and Lake Tahoe in California. Perseverance will shoot the lasers on the rocks most likely to contain evidence of past microscopic life, analyzing the emitted vapors and drilling into the best candidates. A few dozen basic samples – about half a kilogram of rock and dust – will be set aside in sealed titanium tubes for future takeover.
ROUND TRIP TICKET
Scientists have wanted to get their hands on the rocks of Mars since NASA sailors provided the first close-up images half a century ago. NASA is teaming up with the European Space Agency to do just that. The bold plan calls for a rover and return missile to be launched on Mars in 2026 to recover the stockpile of Perseverance. NASA expects to bring back the rocks as early as 2031, a few years before the first astronauts arrived on the scene. The rover’s super sterilized test tubes are the cleanest components ever sent into space, according to NASA, to avoid contaminating traces of the Earth.
COVID19 PRECAUTIONS
Speaking of clean, NASA’s control of Mars’ mission has never been so spotless. Instead of going through peanut jars just before the Perseverance landed – a tradition of luck dating back decades – masked flight controllers will receive their own individual luggage. It is one of the many COVID-19 precautions in the California jet propulsion laboratory. The landing team will be deployed in several rooms, with NASA bushes and journalists watching from a distance. Launched in July last year, the aptly named Perseverance bears a plaque honoring health workers who have battled the virus in the past year.
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