Currently hurtling through space, less than 25 million miles from its destination, NASA’s Perseverance rover will soon make the most difficult landing attempted on Mars before starting its hunt for the old life.
When it arrives on February 18th, Persistence will penetrate the atmosphere of Mars at more than 20,000 miles per hour and slide like a meteor across the Martian sky for seven nail-biting minutes before finally hitting the Jezero crater, a spot that the Curiosity robber was technologically unable to achieve.
NASA scientists call it the “seven minutes of terror. “
NASA / JPL-Caltech
The rover must survive both intense heat similar to the surface of the sun and deceleration during descent, while also trying to land in the right place. A parachute with a diameter of 20 meters will help him slow down as he tries to find his way to the crater.
Then a “skycrane”, which was also used by Curiosity, Perseverance will sink to the surface. When the rover eventually lands, it will land on its wheels at a speed slower than humans are walking.
“I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that entry, descent and landing (EDL) is the most critical and dangerous part of the mission,” Allen Chen, the EDL leader, said at a news conference this week. “Success is never guaranteed, especially when we try to land the biggest, toughest and most complicated rover we’ve ever built in the most dangerous place we’ve ever tried to land.”
And persistence has to do all of this alone. It takes radio signals over 11 minutes to return to Earth, so the whole EDL will be done without the help of mission control.
NASA / JPL-Caltech
NASA chose it Crater lake as a landing site because, based on orbital photos of the region, scientists believe it was once filled with water, home to an ancient river delta. The water has long since disappeared, but deposits on the bottom make the crater an ideal place to look for signs of ancient life.
The crater is filled with steep cliffs, sand, boulders and impact craters, which make landing difficult. When Persistence lands, it should do so near the remnants of the delta, where spores of microbial organisms could have settled.
“Jezero Crater is a great place, a wonderful place for science. But when I look at it from a landing perspective, I see danger,” Chen said. “It’s a formidable challenge.”
The Perseverance robber, that launched last July, is the largest vehicle NASA has ever attempted to land on Mars, weighing over a ton and with 50% more science and technology than Curiosity, which landed in 2012. Two new technologies will help Perseverance land safely: the rover to decide when to deploy the parachute, and terrain-related navigation, which essentially gives the rover eyes and a map so it can check if it lands in the right place.
“If it wasn’t for range trigger and relative terrain navigation, we just couldn’t go to Jezero,” Chen said.
NASA / JPL-Caltech
The coronavirus pandemic has only made landing more complicated.
“We were hoping that the situation in our world regarding COVID would have improved since its launch. That has not been the case, which meant that we had to be flexible and adapt to keep working safely and effectively,” said Thomas Zurbuchen , Associate Administrator of the Scientific Mission Directorate. “Regardless of all that has happened thanks to COVID, it is the constant innovation, dedication and most importantly the unity of this team that has allowed work on the Perseverance rover to continue in a safe manner.”
Perseverance brings with it a ton of cool, new technology, including one small helicopter called Ingenuity and the necessary tools to collect samples for future research on Earth. For the first time, thanks to a new camera and microphone system, we can also see and hear what it’s like to land on another planet.
These new and more accurate EDL technologies will help human exploration of the red planet in the future, scientists said.
NASA will live stream the historic event on its website Feb. 18, starting at 2:15 p.m. ET.