Racing through space at over 12,000 mph, NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover We reached Mars on Thursday and it stopped for an exciting seven minutes through the atmosphere to domain on the surface of the red planet look for evidence of past microbial life in the remains of an ancient lake.
“Touchdown has proven! Perseverance is safely on the surface of Mars, ready to start searching for signs of a past life!” Swati Mohan, a telemetry surveillance, navigation and control officer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, called when the rover went down. Connected flight engineers, if the distance goes socially, explode into cheers and applause, anxious providing relief in current happiness.
NASA
The relief was easy to understand. Often described as “seven minutes of horror,” the rover’s descendants were a nail feeding series of computer-ordered make-or-break events that had to work in a very rare fashion to get the 2,260-pound rover safely down an old lake bed in a Jezero Crater, avoiding dangerous cliffs, large boulders and sand dunes in the process.
And the $ 2.4 billion rover did just that.
“I almost feel like I’m in a dream,” said Jennifer Trosper, deputy project manager. “Our job is to think about the bad things that can happen and try to avoid those, and when all good things happen, you feel like you are dreaming. And I’m happy to feel like I’m dreaming! “
President Biden tweet: “Congratulations to NASA and all those who did their hard work to land the historic land of Perseverance.”
The rover hit the top of the visible Martian atmosphere at 3:48 pm EST and swayed swiftly in an explosion of atmospheric frost, its protective heat shield surviving temperatures as high as 2,700 degrees – hot enough for stainless steel to melt – and a braking force of 10 times the force of gravity on Earth.
Descending to just under 1,000 miles per hour, he placed a large 70.5-foot-wide parachute in the overhead slide and used an advanced guidance system to identify hazards and find a safe place to land on the floor Jezero Crater.
Then, less than a minute from a touchdown, at an altitude of about 2.1 mph, free-standing permanence fell from his parachute while still descending at about 200 mph. Seconds later, eight engines fired in a rocket-powered backpack, dragging the craft to less than 2 mph before reaching an expected altitude of just 70 feet or so.
At that point, durability was lowered toward the surface suspended by tethers while the jet pack continued to descend. At 3:55 pm, the six wheels of the rover fixed to the surface, the tethers were cut off and the backpack “sky crane” flew to a safe distance.
“Hello, world,” Perseverance “tweeted” a few minutes after landing, posting the first image of the rover of his landing site. “My first look at my home forever.”
The Earth fell under the horizon as seen from Jezero Crater about a minute before it went around, cutting off direct-to-Earth X-band radio signals from Perseverance. But UHF signals proving landing were transmitted to JPL by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which was passing above them.
“Sky crane maneuvering has begun. About 20 meters above the surface,” Mohan said as the rover’s descent came to an end.
“We’re still getting signals from MRO,” an engineer said
“Touchdown has proven!” Mohan called a minute later.
A few minutes later, the first image from one of the rover danger cameras came in, showing a very smooth surface with no large boulders or other obstacles visible. “YES! Whoo Hoo!” an engineer shouted as the picture went up on control room displays.
NASA / JPL-Caltech
The rover’s automatic rescue seemed to be going useless as its flying computer was using a number of cameras, radar and other sensors to determine where it was in terms of the target landing. The rover then changed its course as necessary to avoid potential hazards ending missions.
Persecution had to land on its own because radio signals, moving at 186,000 miles per second, needed more than 11 minutes to cross the 127-million-mile gulf between Earth and Mars. Flight engineers at JPL could only sit and wait, watching data fall in 11 minutes after the fact.
And to their relief, seven months later launch from Cape Canaveral and an interplanetary cruise covering 293 million miles, NASA’s fifth Mars rover, the first designed specifically to look for signs of a past life, was safely on the surface of the red planet.
Jezero Crater was targeted because he once held a 28-mile-wide water body of Lake Tahoe. A river fed the old lake that cut through the edge of the crater, depositing sediments in a fan-like delta clearly visible from orbit. The rover reached about 1.2 miles southeast of the delta, near the center of the expected 4.8-by-4.1-mile footprint.
“We think we’re looking south-east based on the reflections, about 140 degrees,” said Trosper. “The tilt is flat, it’s about 1.2 degrees. The power system looks good … everything looks great. “
NASA / JPL-Caltech
Robot geologist on Mars
Assuming major problems do not develop, engineers expect to spend around 90 days inspecting the rover’s complex instruments and systems.
During the first month, they also plan to deploy and test a 4.5-pound, $ 80 million helicopter with the name Ingenuity that will attempt the first powered flight in the shallow air of Mars, the “Wright brothers’ moment” into another world.
Another test will test the ability to extract oxygen from the Martian atmosphere, a technology that could help future astronauts produce their own air and rocket fuel.
But the main goal of the mission is to look for signs of biological activity in the past.
Equipped with a robot arm, a heart sampling drill and a series of solemn cameras, rock vaporizing lasers and other instruments, Perseverance explores lake bed deposits, traverses the delta and finally makes it up to the shores of an ancient lake , promising collection of samples along the way.
Selected rocks and soils will be placed in a complex indoor carousel device that automatically captures, analyzes and loads in lipstick-sized air tubs. The rover then deposits, or deposits, the sealed samples on the surface of Mars to await construction.
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 another spaceship snatching them for the journey back to Earth.