The landing of NASA’s next Mars rover is now just a few days away.
The Perseverance Rover, the hub of NASA’s $ 2.7 billion March 2020 broadcast, will hunt for signs of ancient life, collect monsters and put them in the closet for future returns to Earth, and help demonstrate a variety of new exploration technologies, among others.
But before it can begin pioneering work, endurance must be touched within Mars’ Jezero Crater On February 18, there is no guarantee that the rover will survive this severe ordeal; over the years, only 40% of all Mars surface missions have landed successfully.
However, the depressing figure is distorted by many failures in the first few decades of the space age. NASA’s recent Red Planet record is very encouraging (beating wood), and Mars 2020 will use a proven landing strategy – the “sky crane” technique successfully used by its predecessor, the Curiosity, which was affected in August 2012 and is still active.
Here’s a brief overview of the Mars 2020 mission and the upcoming operational, descent and landing operations (EDL) to get you ready for the big day.
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What is the Mars Rover Perseverance Mission?
Curiosity assessed the habitability of ancient Mars and examined the planet’s transition from relatively hot and wet to extremely cold and dry. The Mars 2020 mission, launched on July 30, 2020, will take the next step in actively searching for signs of ancient Red Planet life. No surface mission has ever done this, although NASA’s twin landers from Viking did search for Mars life after they hit in 1976.
Perseverance will also help the Mars hunt for life down to earth. The rover will collect and store several dozen monsters, which will be transported to our planet by a NASA European Space Agency campaign already in 2031. Once the pristine Martian material is on the ground, scientists in laboratories around the world can examine it using much more powerful and accurate equipment than a single rover can transport to the Red Planet.
March 2020 also has a major component for technology demonstration. For example, a small helicopter named Ingenuity fly to the Red Planet on endurance. In the early days of the Mars 2020 mission, which is expected to last at least one Mars year (approximately 687 Earth Days), Ingenuity will undertake several test flights to become the first rotorcraft ever to fly on a world beyond Earth. Success could open up Mars in the future to extensive aerial reconnaissance, NASA officials said.
The 2,260 pounds. (1,025 kilograms) Perseverance also carries an instrument called MOXIE, which is the abbreviation for “Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment.” (And ISRU stands for ‘in situ resource utilization’.) MOXIE will generate oxygen from the thin, carbon dioxide-dominated Martian atmosphere, showcasing technology that, when enlarged, can help humanity gain a foothold on the Red Planet, NASA officials said. said.
You can learn more about endurance and its scientific goals March 2020 reference sheet.
NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover mission: live updates
Where does endurance land?
NASA announced in November 2018 that perseverance will explore the Jezero crater, a 28-kilometer-wide (45-kilometer) hole in the ground, about 18 degrees north of the Martian equator.
More than 3.5 billion years ago, Jezero offered a lake the size of Lake Tahoe, as well as an associated river delta. And NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spotted clay minerals, which form in the presence of liquid water, on the crater’s floor.
“On Earth, scientists have found such clays in the Mississippi River Delta, where microbial life has been found embedded in the rock,” agency officials said in a statement. description of Jezero. “This makes the Jezero Crater an excellent place to achieve the Mars 2020 mission’s scientific goal of studying a potentially habitable environment that can still preserve signs of past life.”
And if you were wondering (or hoping): a meeting between perseverance and curiosity is not going to happen. Jezero is about 3,700 kilometers from Gale Crater, which Curiosity has been exploring since 2012.
Related: NASA’s Mars Rover Perseverance is home to its journey to Red Planet
How and when will perseverance land?
Speaking of curiosity: the older mission provided a template for Mars 2020 in several ways. Perseverance’s body is very similar to Curiosity, for example, and the two missions share the same dramatic EDL strategy of “seven minutes of terror”.
As Mars 2020 approaches the Red Planet on the afternoon of 18 February, the spacecraft will shake off its cruise stage, the part that the solar panels, fuel tanks and radios need for its long interplanetary journey. Ten minutes after this milestone, Mars 2020 will hit the atmosphere of the Red Planet at a speed of almost 12,500 km / h (20,000 km / h), and the countdown clock of terror will begin to tick.
Although the atmosphere of Mars is only 1% as thick as Earth, it is essential enough to dramatically slow down Mars 2020 through resistance. But the service has a cost: frictional heating, which will generate temperatures up to 2300 degrees Celsius (2,370 degrees Fahrenheit) on the surface of the spacecraft’s heat. Perseverance itself, of course, will not experience such extremes; it’s about room temperature in Mars 2020’s protective aeroshell, which consists of the heat shield and a piece called the rear shell.
Mars 2020 will penetrate the 70.5-foot-wide (21.5 m) supersonic parachute about four minutes into the atmosphere, when the spacecraft has slowed to a much more manageable 940 mph (1,512 km / h). To get the timing of the implementation just right, Mars 2020 uses a new technology called Range Trigger, which Curiosity did not have.
Twenty seconds after the supersonic gutter made its appearance, Mars 2020 will shed its heat shield and expose perseverance to the fast-storming Red Planet sky. The rover will then begin documenting its descent in detail, taking photos of the Martian surface and using radar to determine its altitude.
The photos will be used by another new technology that will be shown in March 2020 – Terrain-relative navigation, which involves comparing descent images with a map on board.
“Mission crew members have previously mapped the safest areas of the landing zone,” NASA officials said in a statement. detailed summary of the Mars 2020 EDL series. “If perseverance can see it on its way to more dangerous terrain, it chooses the safest place it can reach and prepares for the next dramatic step.”
The parachute will delay Mars 2020 to 320 km / h – still too fast for a safe landing. Thus, about six minutes into the seven minutes of scare, at an altitude of 2,100 m (2,100 m), the rear shell and the attached parachute will fall away and the “sky crane” canopy stage of the mission will kick into gear.
The eight propellers of the crane will shoot downwards and eventually delay March 2020 to just 1.7 km / h (2.7 km / h). Then, at an altitude of 65 feet (20 meters), the crane with long cables will lower the endurance to the ground. After touching the rover safely, he will cut off the cables and the downhill road will intentionally land a safe distance past flying.
The touchdown will take place on February 18 at 15:55 EST (1855 GMT), if all goes according to plan.
Yes, that sounds a little crazy, especially when we consider that Mars 2020 will have to do everything on its own, without any help from mission control. (On February 18, a signal from Earth to Mars will take longer than 11 minutes – longer than the entire EDL series.) But it worked for Curiosity in 2012.
And we will be able to follow all the EDL actions in (almost) real time: NASA is offering coverage of the big event from 18:15 EST (1715 GMT) on 18 February. You can see it live here on Space.com, courtesy of NASA, or directly via the space agency.
And in the dubious days after a successful landing (knocking on wood again), we were able to get an unprecedented treat – high-quality video and audio from Mars 2020’s touch sequence, thanks to HD EDL cameras and a accompanying microphone.
Visit Space.com on February 18 for full coverage of the landing of the Mars Rover Perseverance.
Mike Wall is the author of “Out there“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.