LOS ANGELES – When NASA’s Mars Rover Perseverance, a robotic astrobiology lab in a space capsule, hits the last stretch of its seven-month journey from Earth this week, it’s set to emit a radio alert while in scattering the thin atmosphere of Mars.
By the time the signal reaches mission managers about 127 million miles away at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) near Los Angeles, perseverance will have already landed on the Red Planet – hopefully in one piece.
The seven-wheeler is expected to take seven minutes to descend from less than the 11-minute radio transmission to Earth from the top of the Martian atmosphere to the planet’s surface. So the final, self-guided descent of the spacecraft will take place Thursday during a white-collar interval that JPL engineers lovingly call the “seven minutes of terror.”
Al Chen, head of the JPL descent and landing team, calls it the most critical and dangerous part of the $ 2.7 billion mission.
“Success is never guaranteed,” Chen said in a recent newsletter. “And this is especially true when we try to land the biggest, heaviest and most complicated rover we have ever built to the most dangerous terrain we have ever tried to land.”
There is a lot of driving about the result. Based on discoveries of nearly 20 U.S. missions to Mars dating back to Mariner 4’s 1965 flight, Perseverance could potentially set the scene for scientists to unequivocally demonstrate whether extraterrestrial life exists, paving the way for ultimate human missions. to the fourth planet from the sun. . A safe landing, as always, comes first.
Success will depend on a complex series of events that unfold without hitches – from inflation of a giant, supersonic parachute to the deployment of a jet-powered ‘sky crane’ that will descend to a safe landing site and soar above the surface while the swing bag on the ground on a tire.
“Perseverance must do it alone,” Chen said. “We can not help it during this period.”
If all goes according to plan, the NASA team will receive a follow-up radio signal shortly before 1pm in Pacific time confirming that perseverance on Mars soil lies on the edge of an ancient, long-vanished river delta and lake bed .
Surface science
From there, the nuclear battery-powered crossbar, about the size of a small sports utility vehicle, will tackle the main goal of its two-year mission – a complex set of tools in search of signs of microbial life that may have flourished Mars billions of years ago. ago.
Advanced power tools will drill samples from Mars rock and seal them in cigar-sized tubes for eventual return to Earth for further analysis – the first such samples that humanity has ever collected from the surface of another planet.
Two future missions to retrieve the monsters and fly back to Earth are in the planning phase by NASA, in collaboration with the European Space Agency.
Perseverance, the fifth and by far most sophisticated rover vehicle that NASA has sent to Mars since Sojourner in 1997, also contains several groundbreaking features not directly related to astrobiology.
Among them is a small drone drone, nicknamed Ingenuity, that will test a flight from another world to another world for the first time. If successful, the four-pound (1.8 kg) whirlybird could pave the way for low surveillance of Mars during later missions.
Another experiment is a device to extract pure oxygen from the carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere, a tool that can be invaluable for future human life support on Mars and to produce rocket fuel to fly astronauts home.
“Spectacular but treacherous”
The first obstacle of the mission after a flight of 293 million miles from Earth, is to deliver the rover intact on the floor of the Jerezo crater, a 28-mile expanse that scientists say contains a rich amount of petrified micro organisms may contain.
“It’s a spectacular landing site,” project scientist Ken Farley told reporters at a teleconference.
What makes the crater’s rugged terrain – deeply carved by long-disappearing liquids – as gripping as a research area also makes it treacherous as a landing zone.
The descending sequence, an upgrade of NASA’s last rover mission in 2012, begins as perseverance, encased in a protective envelope, piercing the Martian atmosphere at 12,000 miles per hour, nearly 16 times the speed of sound on Earth.
After a parachute to slow down the dive, the heat shield will fall off the descent capsule to release a jet-powered “crane” glider with the robber at its belly.
Once the parachute is fired, the jet’s beams will immediately ignite, slowing its descent to running speed as it approaches the crater floor and self-navigating to a slippery landing site, without sending rocks, cliffs and sand dunes.
The air crane hangs over the surface due to lower permeability on nylon tires, cuts the chords as the wheels of the wheels reach the surface and then flies away to fall away a safe distance.
If all went well, Deputy Project Manager Matthew Wallace said the exuberance after the landing at JPL would be fully exhibited, despite the safety protocols of COVID-19 that kept close contacts within the mission control to a minimum.
“I don’t think COVID will be able to stop us jumping up and down and pounding our fists,” Wallace said.