NASA’s perseverance The Mars rover has shut down on the red planet after a journey of 293 million miles, heading for a seven-minute descent that bit its nails until Thursday’s touchdown. The mission is an unprecedented attempt to find signs of past microbial life at the site of an ancient Martian river, delta and lake bed.
Mission managers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said the spacecraft is healthy and flawlessly executing its final approach to Crater Lake, preparing for a high speed descent that engineers only half jokingly refer to “seven minutes of terror.”
How to track the Perseverance Mars rover that lands today
- What the: NASA’s Perseverance Rover lands on Mars
- Date: Thursday, February 18, 2021
- Time: The live broadcast starts at 14:15 EST; The landing process is scheduled to begin at 3:48 p.m. EST
- Location: Crater Lake on Mars
- Online stream: Live on CBSN – in the player above and on your mobile or streaming device
Asked what the chances were for a successful landing, Deputy Project Director Matt Wallace said the sheer complexity of the 2,260-kilogram rover, the heaviest and most sophisticated ever sent to Mars, makes it difficult to predict.
NASA / JPL-Caltech
“We have two million lines of software code running hundreds of thousands of electronic parts, miles of copper conductors, we have more than 70 pyrotechnic devices that all have to pull, closed loop guidance and navigation control systems that they really have to work with sub-second precision for all of this to work, “he said.
“There is no (back) back. There are (no) retries. It is a difficult and dangerous part of the mission. … I think we’ve done everything we can to be successful. And we’ll see how it goes tomorrow. “
Seven months later its launch from Cape Canaveral, the $ 2.4 billion rover embedded in a flying saucer and protected by a blunt thermal shield, will crash into the discernible atmosphere of Mars at 15:48 EST.
Hitting the thin “air”, mostly with carbon dioxide, at 12,000 mph, the ship will decelerate rapidly, withstanding heat shield temperatures of up to 2,370 degrees, as it slows to just under 1,000 mph in about four minutes.
At that time, at an altitude of about seven miles and a speed of about 940 mph, a parachute 70.5 meters wide will unfold in the supersonic flow, slowing the spacecraft to only 200 mph until it reaches an altitude of 1, 3 miles.
“There’s a lot of risk concentrated in that supersonic parachute opening,” said Allen Chen, the engineer who handles the entry, descent and landing of the rover. “It’s a very large parachute the size of a Little League field and opens in about six seconds while going close to Mach 2 (twice the speed of sound).”
“But … we actually did high-altitude supersonic testing (on Earth) this time as part of this project. So we probably have a little more confidence that this will work.”
Starting from the parachute and the back shell a minute before landing, the “sky crane” rocket launch vehicle will run at an altitude of only 70 feet, lowering Perseverance on the floor of the Jezero Crater on fast-release headrests.
NASA / JPL-Caltech
Due to the 127 million mile gulf between Earth and Mars, radio signals will be needed, transmitted through NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, 11 minutes to reach the anxious flight engineers at JPL.
As a result, the success or failure of the rover’s seven-minute descent will depend entirely on its ability to find out exactly where it is in relation to its landing target and to adjust its course autonomously, as necessary, to avoid steep cliffs, boulders, sand dunes and other dangers of completing the mission.
Crater Lake offers one of the best places on Mars to look for signs of past microbial life – but it’s also the most challenging landing point NASA has ever tried to reach Mars.
And it will all end, one way or another, in just seven minutes, long before flight engineers receive signals confirming the start of atmospheric entry. Hence the familiar references to “seven minutes of terror.”
Look for signs of the past life
If Perseverance makes it safe, the robotic geologist will be prepared to answer one of the deepest questions in modern science: Are we alone? Or life, no matter how primitive it may have managed to evolve on another world and, by extension, could exist on countless other worlds in the cosmos?
Jezero Crater was targeted because about 3.5 billion years ago it had a 28-mile-wide body of water the size of Lake Tahoe, which was fed by a river that cut the edge of the crater and deposited sediment in it. -a fan-like delta. from orbit. Perseverance aims at a landing on the lake floor, just beyond the delta.
NASA / JPL-Caltech
Engineers plan to spend about 90 days checking the rover’s complex tools and systems. In the first month, they also plan to deploy and test a small 4.5-pound, 4.5-pound helicopter – Ingenuity – which will attempt the first motorized flight in the thin air of Mars, a “moment of the Wright brothers” on another planet.
Another experiment will test the feasibility of extracting oxygen from the Martian atmosphere, a technology that could help future astronauts produce their own fuel for air and rockets. But the main purpose of the mission is to look for signs of past biological activity.
Equipped with a robotic arm, a sampling drill and a suite of sophisticated cameras, rock vaporization lasers and other instruments, Perseverance will study the deposits on the lakes, venture into the delta, and finally he headed for the shores of the ancient lake, collecting promising evidence 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 lipstick-sized tubes, which will eventually be deposited or stored on the surface.
NASA plans to send another rover to Jezero later this decade to collect the evidence, load it into a small rocket and throw it into orbit on Mars, where a European Space Agency spacecraft will capture and return it. on Earth for laboratory analysis.
But first, perseverance must land safely.
“This is always a challenging challenge for us, this is one of the most difficult maneuvers we do in space,” Wallace said. “Almost 50% of the spacecraft that was sent to the surface of Mars failed. And so we know that we cut our work tomorrow to come to the surface safely at Jezero.”