The largest and most advanced vehicle ever sent to Mars will land on the red planet next week, embarking on a two-year mission to look for signs of life and pave the way for future human visits.
If all is well, the $ 2.7 billion Perseverance rover will land the Jezero crater near the equator of Mars on Thursday to explore the planet’s surface and collect samples that will be returned to Earth. An ultralight helicopter on board will also be launched in what would be the first powered flight on another planet.
“Perseverance is a massive upgrade from all the previous landers and rovers we have sent to the planet,” said Professor Andrew Coates, a space scientist from University College London who has been involved in missions to Mars for 20 years.
But the car-sized Persistence must first survive what NASA engineers called “seven minutes of terror” when the previous Curiosity rover landed in 2012. That’s the time it takes to decelerate from the 20,000 mph takeoff speed, when the craft is in the Martian atmosphere, to a touchdown slower than walking pace.
The technology used will be an improved version of that on Curiosity, with additional safety features, including a “range trigger” to guide the opening of the craft’s chute and maximize the chances of a soft landing.
To do this, Perseverance will have to cut itself out of its parachute and embark on a rocket-powered descent – “a kind of jetpack with eight engines pointing to the ground,” said Al Chen, the engineer responsible for the descent and landing, said. it.
The final stage includes an “overhead crane” that lowers the rover to the surface on a set of cables. When the lander notices that his wheels have hit the ground, he cuts the cables connecting him to the descent vehicle, which takes off to make an emergency landing at a safe distance.
The descent may take as little as seven minutes, but the Jet Propulsion Lab mission controllers in California won’t know for 11 minutes – the time it takes radio signals to travel 200m km back to Earth – if Persistence has landed safely.
Jezero Crater was chosen as the drop site because NASA scientists believe it is one of the best places on Mars to look for signs of ancient microbial life. More than 3 billion years ago, when water flowed on Mars, it was a lake fed by a river with a delta.
Perseverance will travel around the ancient and now parched terrain, armed with tools to dig and examine the rocks and soil – physical and chemical – for fossilized signs of ancient life. Scientists do not expect living organisms.
An aerial view of the crater is provided by the Ingenuity helicopter, which weighs just 1.8kg and is scheduled to make five test flights. It’s not part of the primary science mission, but what NASA calls a technology demonstration to show just how well a helicopter can perform in Mars’s atmosphere, which is only 1 percent as dense as Earth’s.
Another forward-looking technology experiment is the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, or Moxie, the size of a toaster, which will make oxygen from the thin air of Mars by electrochemically breaking down carbon dioxide. If astronauts ever landed and lived on the red planet, they would need locally generated oxygen to breathe and an ingredient for fuel.
Persistence will also leave a legacy on the surface of Mars for future missions. The Sample Caching System will put crushed rock and dust in metal canisters and leave them to be collected and brought to Earth by future missions that NASA is planning in partnership with the European Space Agency.
They hope that by the early 2030s, scientists will be able to analyze these samples in terrestrial labs with equipment far too large and complex to ship to another planet.
It is possible that Perseverance – or the Rosalind Franklin rover to be launched next year as part of Europe’s ExoMars mission – may have found signs of past or even present life on Mars by then. Perseverance looks for geological evidence of stromatolites, stratified deposits built up by microbes in ancient Lake Jezero, among other things.
But confirmation may have to wait a few years before laboratory testing of the samples returns to Earth. “Even if we don’t find any evidence of life at all, that would be important,” said Ken Farley, Perseverance project scientist. “We would have done an in-depth exploration of a habitable environment and showed that it is not inhabited.”
If, on the other hand, undeniable evidence for biological activity was found on the one habitable planet explored beyond Earth, scientists could only draw one conclusion: The universe is teeming with life.