NASA’s next Mars rover, Perseverance, has a group of spacecraft that can track it dangerous descent from above Thursday (February 18).
At least four orbits of NASA and its European counterpart will support the landing, and some of these spacecraft will continue to send back data from Perseverance during the adventures of the rover on the surface of the Red Planet.
The European Space Agency is piloting two spacecraft that will monitor the landing. The ESA Roscosmos ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) will return data to Earth about four hours after landing, ESA said in a release, while the agency’s Mars Express focused on local conditions at the landing site, Jezero Crater, and provided the information to NASA during preparations for tomorrow’s descent. TGO will also try to gauge perseverance in the weeks after landing on the surface.
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NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which regularly serves as a relay for lander radio communications, will be just above during the landing of Perseverance. MRO’s goal is to retrieve information from the rover and send it back to NASA’s Deep Space Network of antennas on Earth so NASA can confirm the landing, which is scheduled for 15:55 EST (2055 GMT).
“MRO is newly set to send telemetry to Earth across the landing timeline in packets of 5 seconds, with a latency of about 16 seconds [delay], “NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California said in a statement. “The DSN’s antenna complex near Madrid, Spain, will lead during entry, descent and landing, with the complex in Goldstone, California, providing support.”
NASA will probably also try to photograph perseverance and its activities on the surface; back in 2012, it’s even manages to catch the Curiosity rover on the surface under a parachute.
NASA always likes backup information, so it will also use its Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) orbit. MAVEN usually does not return information from superficial spacecraft because the data received by the spacecraft is sent after a delay and requires more processing. But MAVEN’s observations will be useful to gather more information on the descent of perseverance and be available about 10 hours after landing, according to JPL.
NASA has already moved MAVEN to support perseverance, and MRO is possibly following suit. Last year, in preparation to support perseverance, MAVEN reduced its highest orbital altitude by switching on (pressing lightly against the Martian atmosphere) and also changing its orbital orientation, NASA’s Mars website said in late January.
NASA could also change the MRO orbit, in part because the spacecraft (which arrived at Mars almost 15 years ago) is aging and the agency wants to extend the life of MRO’s batteries until a new orbit can take its place for relay communications.
Currently, the spacecraft resides in a sun-synchronous orbit with a constant state of light in the afternoon below, which is good for footage in the orbit. NASA may change the orbit of the spacecraft to cross the surface a little later in the day, to reduce how much time the spacecraft spends in shadow and relies on its batteries. SpaceNews said in late January.
L3Harris, an aerospace technology contractor who supplied one of the perseverance antennas, said in a statement that the rover’s communication with orbits only takes about a millisecond to reach, and that the use of the orbits as road stations for information enables more data transfer because the orbits are a little closer to ground antennas than throughput.
The rover can send up to 2 megabits of data per second to the orbits. “Because the rover and orbit antennas are within a short distance of each other, it’s like using walkie-talkies or a cell phone with the tower,” L3Harris said.
The rover can also send signals directly back to Earth, although the information will be sent in tone or a carrier signal – meaning simple signals with little or no engineering data attached, according to the JPL release. The good stuff, during landing and operations, will come via the orbits.
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