Now that the UAE spacecraft Hope and the Chinese Tianwen-1 have successfully reached the Red Planet is NASA’s Perseverance Rover, which will land on 18 February.
Ten operational spacecraft are currently in orbit or on the surface of Mars, ready to welcome the new rover. But one spacecraft in particular, the InSight Lander, will be listening intently to the dramatic entry, descent and landing of Perseverance – also known as the Seven Minutes of Terror.
Scientists will use the specialized tools of InSight to hopefully pick up the sounds of perseverance. Usually these instruments listen to seismic activity on Mars, as well as impact of meteorites. But the timing of these events is not known ahead of time. Therefore, says Ben Fernando, team member of InSight of the University of Oxford, the arrival of Perseverance Rover may provide the first opportunity to detect a known, planned landing of a foreign body on the surface of Mars.
“There’s a huge interest in the InSight team in trying to detect an impact seismic,” Fernando said in a video presentation. “It will be very useful and important to independently examine some of our understanding of the structure of Mars and the way waves propagate through the inside.”
During InSight’s two years on Mars, it detected several hundred marsquakes. However, no meteorite impact events were detected. Impact events are of particular importance because they can be limited in timing and location of photos orbiting satellites.
Additional reading: Thanks to perseverance, we will finally hear what Mars sounds like
Since the exact timing and location of the arrival of Perseverance is already known, an attempt to listen to the rover can be used to calibrate seismic measurements.
Fernando told Universe Today that noise levels will be the biggest challenge.
“The landing is a long way away, so the most important thing that will determine if we hear anything is how noisy it is on the day,” he said in an email.
Fernando said the team was able to determine the location of some Marsquakes, which are apparently in Cerberus Fossae, about 1,700 km from the lander. Perseverance will land in the Jezero Crater, approximately 3,452 kilometers (2145 miles) away from InSight’s location in Elysium Planitia.
But the landing of the Rover will not be exactly what InSight will be listening to. One sound propagating through the atmosphere will be a sonic surge created when the landing capsule slows down as it crashes through the Martian atmosphere.
Shortly after Perseverance hits the atmosphere, the spacecraft will emit two Cruise Mass Balance Devices (CMBDs) to change the center of mass. These each weigh 77 kilograms (170 lbs.) And will be dropped from an altitude of approximately 1,459 km (900 miles) and hit the ground at an estimated 14,000 km / h (8,700 mph).
In their paper describing the experiment, the team said they would receive data from InSight within a day or two after Perseverance’s landing, after which they would investigate whether they had successfully detected it.
“It’s an incredibly exciting experiment,” Fernando said. “This is the first time it’s ever been tried on another planet. That’s why we’re really looking forward to seeing how it goes.”