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In the Mission Support Area at the Lockheed Martin campus in Littleton, Colorado, hiding humans sitting near computers, flying three spacecraft in orbit around Mars. These three – the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Maven, and Odyssey – were all responsible, in one way or another, for downloading data from another spacecraft: the Mars Perseverance rover, which trying to land on the Red Planet. Information from these orbiters would help engineers learn about the status of Sustainability as it made its way through the atmosphere, and determine if it survived. “A place to go is not a place to go,” read the words painted on one wall. “A place is a place. ”
Scattered among the usual notes of unauthorized visitors and classified meetings, signs of social distance, strange faces and signs were plastered around the building. “No masks with heating valves” warned a man, aerospacily. A man was posted behind David Scholz’s head at Lockheed, who about an hour before landing had been standing in a conference room 6 feet from all, sporting a blue surgery mask above his two-pocket tan shirt. NASA video feed played in the background. Scholz had just described it as “a courageous shipwreck.” That’s because he’s the chief engineer for a device called an “aeroshell,” which cooks against the worst of the downhill journey to the surface of Mars.
The Lockheed engineers had been working on this project for years, and today, Scholz and his team could finally see that it was used. But that is all they could do: look. Their system was automated, and it would do the job without them.
And so they watched as a human object fell from the sky, aiming to rub down in a crack called Jezero. The landing, scheduled for 12:55 pm Pacific Time, would mark the end of the Perseverance journey through space and the beginning of its journey at this deserted destination: a descent that was – since billions of years – home to a lake and its river delta. It is a place where there is life it was possibletheoretically, they have survived.
Looking for spots that look like they might be accessible to an old life, and evidence of a place to live in the past, are among the goals of the Mars 2020 mission. The rover will also collecting and storing geological samples for future missions to recover, and attempting to extract oxygen from the planet’s abundant carbon dioxide, in anticipation of the needs of human astronauts in the future.
But to get there, the spacecraft had to survive through a harrowing process that engineers call “entry, rescue, and landing,” or EDL, and that’s what the Lockheed Martin crew was now waiting for. quietly. These final stages occur when the (seven clichés of horror) are called (somewhat cliché) – the time when the spacecraft has to adjust its own E, D and L. -operative without going into the ground. While traveling wild, the rover would reach a speed of around 12,100 mph and would feel the equivalent of 12 times the depth of the Earth at deceleration. His protective brush would heat up to about 2,370 degrees Fahrenheit. Many things could go awry: the trade could get too hot; the pieces may not separate when they should have; even if properly separated, they could “reconnect” (read: strike) each other; Perseverance may lie in the wrong place; it could end on its own merits. Choose your own nightmare.
“The main thing about EDL is that everything has to go right,” Allen Chen of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which leads the EDL team, told me a week or two before they landed. . “There is no part of faith.”
The 100 percent performance is that A + that burns nerves for even the confident engineers here at Lockheed Martin who worked on the aeroshell. The aeroshell has two parts: the heat shield, which resembles a steampunk space frisbee, and the backing, a classic space capsule. The heat shield looks down towards the planet as the spacecraft enters the atmosphere, bringing an industrial end to pressure and heat. It is made from slabs of a material called PICA, or pen-impregnated carbon ablator. “As it gets hot, it starts to decompose, and that decomposition takes up a lot of energy and also creates a gas that is a boundary layer that protects the heat shield from the environment,” Scholz explained before he came ashore. The shield is protected, therefore, protecting its load. The machine fires through the atmosphere at a tilt, called Scholz’s “angle of attack,” and directs itself with thrushes.