NASA is about to achieve an unprecedented feat: the agency’s Perseverance Mars rover is about to film its own high-interest landing.
The vehicle almost reached its destination. On February 18, after nearly seven months and 300 million kilometers of space travel, the plan is to fall through the thin Mars atmosphere, put in a parachute and an airplane package and then land gently in an ancient lake bed.
Once installed, it will look for mineral deposits from an ancient lake, which may contain signs of ancient microbial life. The rover is programmed to place samples of Mars rock and soil in the closet so that a future mission can bring it back to earth for scientists to study.
But first the rover must land successfully.
“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 perseverance process at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a press release. . “Success is never guaranteed, 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.”
A series of precise, automatic maneuvers must run exactly right to deliver endurance safely to its destination. There is no room for error.
That’s why aviation engineers have a special nickname for this phase of a Mars mission: ‘seven minutes of scare’.
For endurance, this process will be all the more frightening because of the landing site. The Jezero Crater of Mars is a dried-up lake bed rich in exposed layers of ancient rock, which may contain remnants of previous microbial life. Steep cliffs run through the middle of the landing site, along with sand dunes and rocks.
“Jezero Crater is a great place, a great place for science,” Chen said. “But when I look at it from a landing perspective, I see danger.”
However, if endurance arrives safely, it will radiate the first footage of a landing on another planet. High-definition cameras and microphones on the rover should record the whole thing, and NASA said the material will be available later.
“We’re really looking forward to taking everyone along for the ride,” Chen said.
A parachute and a jetpack will slow down Perseverance’s perseverance
A NASA animation shows what the throughput landing should look like if all goes well:
The illustration below sets out each step of the process.
“We literally have seven minutes to go from the top of the atmosphere to the surface of Mars, from 13,000 km / h to zero in perfect order, perfect choreography, perfect timing,” said Adam Steltzner, chief engineer of the Perseverance Mission, said in a 2012 NASA JPL video about the Curiosity rover (which is still going strong on Mars). “The computer has to do it on its own without help from the ground up. If one thing just doesn’t work right, it’s done.”
The first step in Perseverance’s landing process is that the spacecraft transported it 300 million miles to drop its cargo: a top-shaped capsule with the rover inside. This entrance capsule will succumb to the gravity of Mars and descend towards the planet, protecting the permeability with a heat shield.
The capsule will plow more than 12,000 km / h through the atmosphere of Mars, and the shield must deflect material heated by the extreme speed. The outside of the heat shield will become up to 2,370 degrees Fahrenheit. This will cause it to streak across the Martian sky like a bright meteor.
Mars’ atmosphere is about 1% as thick as ours on Earth, but it should still slow down the capsule.
The capsule must use its propellers to move towards the landing target, as air pockets with different densities can tilt it off course.
As soon as it slows down to twice the speed of the sound, Perseverance will use a 70-foot-wide parachute. Then the capsule will deflect its heat shield, paving the way for the Rover’s radar system to explore the land below. An autopilot-like navigation system must begin to reconfigure the vehicle’s trajectory to the landing site.
This system, called ‘terrain-relative navigation’, compares what the rover’s cameras see with a map aboard the Martian surface, built from satellite imagery. It must recognize and avoid the cliffs, sand dunes and rocks that sow the Jezero crater.
Perseverance’s supersonic parachute can only slow down its descent to about 150 km / h – as fast as a parachutist who falls to the ground without a parachute. That’s why NASA engineers also equipped the car with a jetpack.
About a mile above the Martian surface, the jetpack will ignite its engines, with the robber at the bottom.
The jetpack separates from the remaining parts of the entrance capsule and flies through to a safe place identified by the terrain-relative navigation. By the time the robber reached his landing site, his speed must have slowed to about 1.5 km / h.
Very slowly, the jetpack will flush open 25-foot-long nylon cords that will lower endurance until its wheels hit the ground.
A few minutes later, mission controllers should get the signal that the rover has touched.
Assuming everything is right, the rover will spend a few months researching and calibrating its scientific instruments. Then he will drop a helicopter off his belly and turn his cameras towards the drone as it takes off for the first time ever controlled flight on another planet.
Then the rover will continue on its core mission: searching for ancient rocks that may contain hints of microbial alien life.
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