Racing through space at over 12,000 mph, NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover reached Mars Thursday and took a thrilling seven-minute dive through the atmosphere to land- on the surface of the red planet to look for evidence of microbial life in the remains of an ancient lake.
Touchdown confirmed! Perseverance is safe on the surface of Mars, ready to start looking for the signs of past life! Swati Mohan, a guidance, navigation, and control officer monitoring telemetry at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, shouted when the rover landed. Delighted, when socially aloof, the flight engineers erupted in cheers and applause as fear gave way to relief in the joy of the moment.
NASA
The relief was understandable. Often described as “seven minutes of terror,” the robber’s descent was one nail biting sequence of computer-orchestrated make-or-break events that had to work near-flawlessly to safely take down the 2,260-pound robber on an old lake bottom in Jezero Crater, avoiding dangerous cliffs, large boulders and sand dunes.
And the $ 2.4 billion robber did just that.
“I almost feel like I’m in a dream,” said Jennifer Trosper, deputy project manager. “Our job is to think about all the bad things that can happen and avoid them, and when all the good things happen, you feel like you are dreaming. And I’m glad I’m dreaming!”
President Biden tweeted: “Congratulations to NASA and everyone whose hard work made Perseverance’s historic landing possible.”
The rover reached the top of Mars’ observable atmosphere at 3:48 p.m. EST and quickly decelerated in a burst of atmospheric friction, with the protective heat shield enduring temperatures as high as 2,700 degrees – hot enough to melt stainless steel – and stopping power of 10 times the force of gravity on Earth.
Slowing to just under 1,000 mph, he dropped a giant 70.5-foot-wide parachute into the supersonic slipstream and used an advanced guidance system to identify hazards and secure a landing spot on the floor by Jezero Crater.
Then, less than a minute before landing, at an altitude of about 2.1 miles (3.4 km), Perseverance fell from its parachute while still descending at about 200 mph. Seconds later, eight engines in a rocket-powered backpack cranked up, slowing the craft to less than 2 mph by the time it reached an expected height of just 70 feet or so.
At that point, stamina was lowered to the surface, suspended from ropes, as the jetpack continued the descent. At 3:55 pm, the rover’s six wheels were on the surface, the cables were cut and the “Sky Crane” backpack flew off to crash at a safe distance.
“Hello world,” Perseverance tweeted a few minutes after landing, posting the rover’s first image of its landing site. “My first look at my forever home.”
Earth fell below the horizon about a minute before landing, as seen from Jezero Crater, cutting off X-band radio signals from Perseverance directly to Earth. But UHF signals confirming the landing were relayed to JPL by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which passed overhead.
“The overhead crane maneuver has begun. About 20 meters above the surface,” Mohan reported as the rover’s descent neared its end.
“We are still getting signals from MRO,” said an engineer
“Touchdown confirmed!” Mohan called out a moment later.
Moments later, the first image from one of the rover’s hazard cameras came in, with a relatively flat surface with no large boulders or other obstructions in sight. “YES! Whoo Hoo!” an engineer exclaimed as the photo appeared on the displays in the control room.
NASA / JPL-Caltech
The rover’s automatic descent seemed to go smoothly, as the flight computer used multiple cameras, radar and other sensors to find out exactly where it was in relation to its planned landing target. The rover then adjusted its course as necessary to avoid possible mission hazards.
Perseverance had to accomplish the landing on its own, as radio signals, traveling at 186,000 miles per second, took more than 11 minutes to bridge the 127 million mile gap between Earth and Mars. On-board technicians at JPL could only wait and see the data drip 11 minutes later.
And to their relief, seven months later launch from Cape Canaveral and an interplanetary cruise of 293 million miles, NASA’s fifth Mars rover, the first to be specially designed to look for signs of past life, was safely on the surface of the red planet.
Jezero Crater was targeted because it once contained a 28-mile wide body of water the size of Lake Tahoe. The old lake was fed by a river that cut through the crater’s rim, depositing sediments in a fan-like delta clearly visible from orbit. The rover landed about 1.2 miles southeast of the delta, near the center of its predicted landing footprint of 4.8 by 4.1 miles.
“We think we’re looking southeast from the shadows, about 140 degrees,” Trosper said. “The tilt is flat, about 1.2 degrees. The drive system looks good … everything looks great.”
NASA / JPL-Caltech
A robotic geologist on Mars
Assuming no major problems arise, engineers plan to spend about 90 days examining the rover’s complex instruments and systems.
During the first month, they also plan to put in and test just under 4.5 pounds, $ 80 million helicopter called Ingenuity that will attempt the first powered flight in the thin air of Mars, a “Wright Brothers’ moment” on another world.
Another experiment will test the feasibility of extracting oxygen from the atmosphere of Mars, technology that could one day help future astronauts produce their own air and rocket fuel.
But the mission’s primary purpose is to look for signs of past biological activity.
Equipped with a robotic arm, a drill for taking core sampling and an array of advanced cameras, lasers for rock evaporation and other instruments, Perseverance will study the deposits of the bottom, venture through the delta and eventually make its way to the coastline of the old lake, where promising samples are collected along the way.
Selected rocks and soil will be placed in a complex internal carousel mechanism that autonomously photographs, analyzes and loads them into airtight lipstick-sized tubes. The rover will then deposit, or cache, the sealed samples on the surface of Mars, awaiting retrieval.
NASA and the European Space Agency plan to send another rover to Jezero later this decade to collect the samples, load them into a small rocket and blast them into Mars orbit, where yet another spacecraft will launch them. hooks for the flight back to Earth.