NASA’s Perseverance rover successfully lands on the surface

NASA successfully landed its fifth robotic rover on Mars on Thursday, with the US space agency confirming that Perseverance has landed safely on the red planet’s surface.

“Touchdown confirmed,” said NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory mission control. “Endurance safe on the surface of Mars, ready to begin searching for the sands of past life.”

The rover is the most technologically advanced robot NASA has ever sent to Mars, and the agency aims to explore the surface for nearly two years. The agency has spent about $ 2.4 billion to build and launch the Perseverance mission, with an additional $ 300 million in costs to land and operate the rover on the surface of Mars.

Based on its predecessor Curiosity, which reached Mars in August 2012 and is still in use today, the Perseverance rover was built by NASA’s JPL in California. Multiple companies contributed components of the spacecraft, such as the Lockheed Martin-built heat shield, Aerojet Rocketdyne-built rocket propellers, and the robotic arm built by Maxar Technologies.

Perseverance also carries a small helicopter named Ingenuity, which NASA plans to use to attempt the first flight on another planet.

The rover is about the size of a small car, weighs about a ton in total and is 3 meters long, 3 meters wide and 2 meters high. It has a robotic arm that is about two meters long, the end of which has a robotic hand with a camera, chemical analyzer and rock drill. Perseverance is powered by nuclear power, with a plutonium generator supplied by the United States Department of Energy to generate electricity for its pair of lithium-ion batteries.

Perseverance has traveled 293 million miles to reach Mars in the course of more than six months since its launch on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket on July 30.

The rover’s landing marked the typical “seven minutes of terror” that NASA engineers describe for every spacecraft attempting to reach the surface of Mars. That’s the time it takes to enter Mars’ atmosphere and descend to the surface, and it’s so named because it takes 11 minutes for communications from the rover to travel back to Earth – meaning the time delay requires that the spacecraft and the rover land autonomously.

Perseverance entered the atmosphere of Mars in a capsule that protected the rover as it traveled at about 12,100 miles per hour. The spacecraft then deployed a parachute to slow down before throwing the capsule and heat shield overboard, then firing its rocket thrusters to slow itself from about 170 miles per hour to about two miles per hour.

The spacecraft then deployed its “air crane,” which lowered the rover to the surface for the remaining meters.

Perseverance landed in the Jezero Crater, a 28-mile wide basin in Mars’ northern hemisphere. It is a place where NASA believes that a body of water about the size of Lake Tahoe flowed. NASA’s science team hopes the ancient river delta may have preserved organic molecules and other possible signs of microbial life, which Perseverance will try to track down with its instruments.

In addition to its scientific tools, the rover also has a memorial plaque honoring COVID-19 health workers and paying tribute to the fallout from the pandemic.

The rover also has the names of 10.9 million people stenciled on three silicon chips on the rover, with the words “Explore as one” written in Morse code.

The rover is packed with cameras to capture its expedition, with the robot packed with scientific instruments to measure the planet’s geology – and hopefully collect samples that NASA wants to return to Earth one day.

NASA plans to float persistence over the surface for one Mars year, which is equivalent to 687 days on Earth.

It has seven main instruments for a wide variety of purposes: Mastcam-Z, Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA), Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE), Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL), Radar Imager for Mars’ Subsurface Experiment (RIMFAX), scanning habitable environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals (SHERLOC) and SuperCam.

The rover also has a sample caching system, which has nine different drill heads and a large number of sample collection tubes to capture bits of the Martian surface for eventual return to Earth.

“Perseverance is the first rover to bring a sample caching system to Mars that will package promising samples for return to Earth on a future mission,” NASA said in a press release. “Rather than pulverizing rock like Curiosity’s drill does, Perseverance’s drill will cut intact rock cores about the size of a piece of chalk and place them in sample tubes that it will store until the rover reaches a suitable deposition site on Mars . “

NASA hopes to return the monster in the future as part of a campaign in partnership with the European Space Agency.

The rover is designed to cover more ground than any other robot previously sent to Mars. NASA designed Perseverance to travel an average of 200 meters per day on Mars, which is close to the longest ride completed at 210 meters previously in a day by NASA’s Opportunity rover.

Perseverance also carries the Ingenuity helicopter. A few months after landing, NASA plans to deploy the helicopter from under Perseverance in a flat area. The rover will then drive about 100 meters away to record the escape attempt with the rover’s cameras.

If all goes well, Ingenuity’s flight will be the first powered controlled flight on another planet, in what NASA describes as “a Wright Brothers moment” on Mars.

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