NASA Mars Perseverance Rover: What to Expect on Landing Day

When it comes to space events, few things are as thrilling as landing a vehicle on another planet. It’s tense. It is exciting. Much is at stake. On Feb. 18, NASA’s Perseverance rover will attempt to hold the landing on Mars, ushering in a new era in exploration of the red planet.

While NASA has a lot of experience in delivering machines to Mars (look at you here, Curiosity and In sight), that doesn’t make it any easier this time. “Landing on Mars is difficult,” said NASA. “Only about 40 percent of missions ever sent to Mars – by a space agency – have been successful.”

It’s going to be a wild ride. Here’s what to expect on Perseverance landing day.

How to watch

NASA provides live coverage of the landing. Mission Control’s NASA TV broadcast begins Thursday, Feb. 18 at 11:15 a.m.PT. Landing in the Jezero crater on Mars is scheduled for approximately 12:30 p.m. PT.

This will not be like a rocket launch where we get to see every detail as it happens. We’ll get commentary and updates from NASA, mission control opinions, and hopefully some images not too long after landing. It will be a must-watch event for space fans.

Perseverance resonates

We’ve been to Mars before. So why all the hype? The red planet is the neighbor of our solar system. It’s rocky like the earth. It has a long history of water. We can imagine that we might live there one day.

“People’s interest in this planet is just extraordinary,” Alice Gorman – space archaeologist and associate professor at Flinders University in Australia – told CNET. Gorman highlighted humanity’s quest for life beyond Earth and how Mars is a candidate for housing microbial life in its ancient past.

There’s also something special about a robber, a wheeled mechanical creature with a “head” and “eyes”. “People feel towards the robbers because they are active and move,” said Gorman, who found it an almost parental feeling of attachment. The outpouring of emotion over the demise of NASA’s Opportunity rover proves how connected humans can get to an explorer on Mars. Perseverance will become our new Martian treasure.

Seven minutes of terror

The arrivals to Mars are always harrowing. NASA calls the process EDL for “enter, descend, and land”.

“On landing, the rover will dive through the rarefied atmosphere of Mars, heat shield first, at speeds in excess of 12,000 mph (about 20,000 km / h),” NASA said in a landing statement. There is a reason NASA describes the landing process as “seven minutes of terror.”

Small thrusters will fire to keep the rover on track during the potentially bumpy ride through the atmosphere. The rover’s protective heat shield helps slow it down. At an altitude of about 11 kilometers, one supersonic parachute will deploy and Perseverance will soon release from its heat shield.

NASA gave a briefing with a detailed overview of the complete EDL sequenceincluding the “sky crane” maneuver, which uses a set of cables to lower the rover’s final distance from the surface.

If all goes well, Perseverance will be on the surface of Mars. “The hardest part is to land softly and not make an emergency landing, and then deploy the moving parts,” said Gorman. Perseverance isn’t the only thing on the journey. It also has a helicopter with the name Ingenuity in its belly. Ingenuity will be unleashed later in the mission.

Experiencing the landing

The mission is equipped with cameras and microphones designed to capture the EDL process, so we can expect to see and hear the excitement of the landing at some point. “It will be the raw noises of the descent that will rise to the surface,” Gorman said. “So that’s a whole different level of sensory engagement.”

It takes time to transmit data between Mars and Earth. For our home, we can’t expect a first photo too long after landing, but it may take a few days for NASA to share the full visual and audio experience with the world.

The agency released an arrival trailer in December featuring an animated, accelerated version of the process. You get the idea how wild it is to land a rover on another planet.

Gorman is excited about getting footage of the rover’s landing site in Jezero Crater. It will be our first close-up of the landscape in an area with a history of water. Perseverance hopes to explore that history and look for evidence of life.

While the photos, sounds, helicopters and comprehensive science will be reasons to celebrate, there’s the big lingering question the mission could answer: Was Mars home to microbial life? Gorman said, “It would be great if we know a little better if anything ever lived on Mars.”

Perseverance is our next great hope in the search for signs of life beyond Earth. It all starts with stabbing the landing.

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