NASA’s latest interplanetary robot is about to attempt a sad thing: landing on Mars.
If it reaches Martian soil in one piece, the Perseverance Rover will explore an ancient lake bed called the Jezero Crater. When the crater was filled with liquid water billions of years ago, scientists believe it could feed microbial life.
Perseverance will look for rocks and mineral deposits in the area for hints of the potential ancient exotic life. It will even collect some rock samples and store them for a future mission to bring back to earth. The rover also has a small helicopter that is expected to perform the first drone flights on another planet.
But only half of the spacecraft that humanity has ever attempted to land on Mars has succeeded. To overcome the chance, NASA hid perseverance in a protective capsule, equipped with a supersonic parachute and a jetpack to slow down the fall and carry it to safety.
The artist’s illustration shows NASA’s Perseverance Rover and Ingenuity helicopter on Mars.
NASA / JPL-Caltech
On February 18, the rover and its landing gear must perform a series of intricate maneuvers perfectly to complete a 12,000-mph fall with a gentle touch. The whole thing has to happen in a short amount of time, engineers call it ‘seven minutes of scare’.
Communicating from Earth to Mars involves an 11-minute delay so NASA mission controllers can not resolve in real-time. By the time they get the signal that the perseverance has begun, the rover will already be on Mars – dead or alive. The landing system must perform each step on its own, with impeccable precision.
To illustrate this nail-biter, NASA has published a realistic animation of the entire process with matching sound effects. This could serve as a preview of the actual footage, as NASA Perseverance has equipped them with cameras and microphones that should capture the whole thing and eventually radiate back to Earth.
Watch every step of the Perseverance Rover landing
This is how the Mars Landing will work if all goes well (turn on the sound for full effect):
First, the spacecraft that Perseverance carries for 300 million miles will release the capsule into the Martian atmosphere. The capsule will descend to Mars and heat the material around it to 2,370 degrees Fahrenheit. Then it will deploy a 70-foot-wide parachute, slowing the fall to about 150 km / h and dropping the ‘heat shield’ panel plowed through the atmosphere.
This will expose the bottom of the rover and give an open view of the bottom. A computer on the rover will begin to evaluate the data from the robot’s cameras and compare it to a detailed map of the Jezero crater to calculate where exactly it is flying and to find the best land.
About a mile above the Martian surface, the capsule will drop the crossbar, with a jetpack on its back. The engines of the jetpack will catch fire and make endurance fly to the landing site. There, the jetpack will slowly lower the rover onto 25-foot-long nylon cords until its wheels hit the ground.
“I do not think I am exaggerating when I say that entry, descent and landing are the most critical and dangerous part of a mission,” Allen Chen, who leads the process for perseverance, said in a recent press release.
After playing the video, he added, “just watching it and thinking about landing makes the blood really flow for me.”