On Thursday afternoon Perseverance, NASA’s most ambitious self-propelled rover, will attempt to make the agency’s most challenging Mars landing. Perseverance features a series of science experiments that search for signs of life, launch a drone helicopter and record the planet’s audio for the first time. But running those experiments only depends on whether “Percy” can hold the landing.
“I just want to say that landing on Mars is difficult,” said Gregorio Villar, a systems engineer with the Entry, Descent and Landing team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Historically, about half of the Mars landings attempted by the US have failed, and Perseverance will be the largest rover attempting this. The location also complicates matters: the rover is targeting Jezero Crater, a dry remnant of what scientists believe was a river delta 3.5 billion years ago. “Usually we try to go to safe places, like very flat areas that aren’t too scary,” says Villar. “But that’s a bit boring for scientists, isn’t it?”
Perseverance was launched on July 30 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, but its journey really started about a decade ago. “There are literally thousands of people over 10 years who have worked on this,” says Villar. The new technology on board the craft is designed to make challenging landings more realistic – and enable more intriguing Mars missions.
This mission is mainly about looking for old traces of life. Once inside the crater, Perseverance will use tools such as the Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry to examine soil structures for patterns indicating past microbial activity. The self-propelled rover is equipped with a first-ever microphone, plus 23 cameras, including the SuperCam, a laser and camera setup that analyzes the chemical composition of Martian dust and minerals, potentially revealing traces of long-ago life.
The rover also has technologies that have nothing to do with the search for aliens. Ingenuity, a small helicopter aboard Perseverance, will conduct the first controlled flight on another planet – a Wright Brothers-esque moment for JPL. And the experiments are powered by a battery that is continuously charged with US-made plutonium fuel.
Since July, while Perseverance sails to Mars, the numerous antennas on board have been pinging high-frequency signals to engineers on Earth. A signal in the X-band has emitted a kind of “heartbeat” during the rover’s journey. “For any given number of seconds it will be like, ‘Okay, I’m still good, I’m still good,’” said Villar.
Separate ultra-high-frequency signals in the megahertz range can also transmit heavier files, such as images from Perseverance’s built-in cameras. The rover will communicate with satellites orbiting the Red Planet, which will send its signals back to Earth. (NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the Maven satellite and their NASA cousins have new company: The United Arab Emirates Hope mission recently placed a probe in orbit, which has returned its first images.) These communication channels will continue to ping NASA on landing day.
But even with all the cameras and the microphone, don’t expect an instant video feed. It takes a while for those large files to be sent. Even rudimentary communication like the “heartbeat tone” takes 11 minutes and 22 seconds to reach Earth at this time of year. That delay means that NASA engineers will not have real-time communication with the craft during the infamous “seven minutes of terror,” when it must survive its descent through the atmosphere of Mars and land autonomously.
You can follow the news from Mission Control on the NASA TV Public Channel, the NASA app, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. The official NASA TV stream begins Thursday, Feb. 18 at 2:15 p.m. EST.