Failure could take many forms next week when NASA’s next-gen rover, Perseverance, reaches the surface of the Red Planet. Here ‘s what needs to go right – and how things could go on all sides quickly – when perseverance tries to land as expected.
For NASA, entry, rescue, and landing (EDL) of Sustainability on Thursday, Feb. 18 there are several points of potential failure. NASA is on it said that “hundreds of things have to go right” for the rover to survive seven minutes of horror. We can’t land safely: According to NASA, only “about 40 percent of all missions ever to Mars – by any space agency.” Dè, yikes.
In short, perseverance has to move from distances reaching 12,500 miles per hour (20,000 km / h) to walking distances over several minutes. Moreover, it has to do this independently, as it takes almost 11 minutes for radio signals to reach the Earth. To make matters worse, NASA is debating two new technologies for the mission, both related to the EDL level and both untested.
The three levels – entry, descent and landing – present their own unique challenges.
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The rover, located inside the descent platform, separates from the level of the cruise, which, with the solar panels, radios and fuel tanks, will no longer be needed. Next, the spacecraft must aim at its own wing so that its heat shield looks forward, a possible action with small thrushes located on the rear ridge. Once it enters the atmosphere, the spacecraft’s heat shield must reach temperatures reaching 2,370 degrees Fahrenheit (1,300 degrees Celsius). Structural failure at this stage would be appalling, ending the mission before it had a chance to begin.
In fact, previous missions to the Red Planet have failed at the Martian threshold. In 1999, NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter went into an orbit that was far too low, causing the spacecraft to burn up into the atmosphere. The tape was finally there lorg to a conversion error, in which imperial units of seconds were not converted to a standard Newton-second metric. Hate it when that happens.
If the level of descent continues to enter the atmosphere, it still has to contend with dense air pockets that could steer it off course. A guided entry will be made to avoid this problem, in which the descending phase will burn small thrushes to compensate.
The opening of the 70-foot (21.5-meter) parachute is adjacent. If the parachute arrives smoothly and without going through, the descent rate drops sharply to 1,000 miles per hour (1,600 km / h), which is still very fast (remember, it has an extremely thin atmosphere. Mars). The use of this supersonic parachute will depend on a new untested technology called Range motivation, which calculates the distance to the lying area and stimulates the parachute at the right time. This is expected to occur about 240 seconds after atmospheric entry, when the descent will be about 7 miles (11 km) above the surface. Perseverance bids a full farewell to its heat shield about 20 seconds after the parachute appears, introducing another point of possible failure.
This is an urgent step – one with a difficult historical precedent. During the he failed ashore of ESA Schiaparelli’s mission in 2016, the platform prematurely downgraded the parachute and heat shield, the product of a software glitch. A computer on board thought it was just a few feet off the ground, but in reality the descent was somewhere between 1.25 and 2.5 miles (2-4 km) above the surface. You can imagine what happened now. The troubled commander Schiaparelli was traveling at about 185 miles per hour (300 km / h) when he broke into a Martian regiment.
With the heat shield gone, and with the rover now finally exposed to the Martian atmosphere, another new technology begins, called Land Address. The performance of this device will be crucial, as the landing site, crater, is very dangerous.
“Jezero is 28 miles wide, but within that range there are many potential dangers to the rover: hills, rock fields, forts, the walls of the crater itself, to name just a few,” he said. Andrew Johnson, chief systems robotics. an engineer at NASA ‘s Jet Deployment Laboratory, he said in a press release. “So, if you come across one of those dangers, that could be devastating for the whole mission. ”
This is how NASA is describing the new device, which should allow the boat to land on the surface with an error rate of approximately 130 feet (40 meters) or less.
Sailing with terrain allows the rover to make much more accurate estimates of its position relative to the ground at the time of descent. […] Using images from Mars orbiters, the mission team creates a map of the landing site. The rover stores this map in its new “brain” computer, which was specifically designed to support Relationship Management. Descending on her parachute, the rover takes pictures of the approaching surface. To find out where his head is, the rover quickly compares the landmarks he sees in the images to the onboard map. Armed with the knowledge of where his head is, the rover explores another onboard map of safe landing zones to reach the safest place he can. The rover can avoid dangerous ground up to about 1,100 feet (335 meters) in diameter (around three end-to-end football fields), by moving itself towards safer ground.
The parachute should slow down the deceleration rate to about 200 miles per hour (320 km / h), which requires one final step to slow down: powered down with eight tiny rockets. After blackening the parachute, the rover, still attached to its back, travels toward the surface from an initial height of 6,900 feet (2,100 meters).
About 12 seconds before it orbits, and at a very reasonable speed of 1.7 miles per hour (2.7 km / h), it will be time for the movement of the skies. The backrest lowers the rover by using three 66-foot (20-meter) long cables, during which time the rover’s legs and wheels move into position. lying to them. Perseverance, the feeling of landing, will let go of the cables, and the level of descent will fall and fall – we hope – far away.
Many moving parts, including some projectiles, obviously make this a very complex dance. The heat shield, parachute, and backshell are all at risk of damaging or otherwise obstructing landing and / or Stability performance.
Again, history provides another example of a mission failing at this stage, namely NASA’s Mars Polar Lander, which died, as the Mars Climate Orbiter, in 1999 (it wasn’t a good year for NASA). according to NASA, was “the most likely cause of the failure of the generation of sputum signals when the laird’s legs were inserted during the descent,” which “falsely indicated that the spacecraft was on rubbing on Mars while it was still descending, ”caused the main engines [to] closing too fast, ”causing the landlord to fall to the Martian surface.
If anything goes wrong when it comes ashore, Swati Mohan will be among the first to experience, as she is. direction, navigation, and control functions direct for the Mars Mission 2020. S.he will be in control of NASA’s mission monitoring the rover’s progress and health at the time of landing.
“Everyday life can throw you bent balls. So we monitor everything at the cruise level, check power to the camera, make sure the data is flowing as expected, ”said Mohan in press release. “And once we get that signal from the rover that says, ‘I’ve come ashore and I’m on stable ground,’ we can signal. ”
The rover, though modeled on Curiosity, has many new features, including a series of cameras and the peer-to-peer capability below the surface with a radar passing through the ground. The rover lands at Jezero’s crater, where he finds signs of an old life. If there ever was life on Mars, a place like Jezero crater – an ancient lake and river delta – would have been a great place for microbes to hang out. In addition to this important astrobiologic work, Perseverance also studies Martian weather and geology, using a small helicopter. named Ingenuity, and collect samples for future missions.
A live stream of NASA cover will land, scheduled for Feb. 18 at 3:30 pm ET (12:30 pm PT). We look and hope for the the best.