NASA’s Perseverance Rover nails Mars landing and sends first images of Jezero Crater

NASA’s ambitious, next-generation Perseverance Rover, a mobile laboratory for 1 ton of mobile science, was slowly lowered to the surface of an old lake beak on Mars on Thursday afternoon. The landing took place at 12:55 PT on the earth, with NASA Engineer Swati Mohan delivers the final, critical words: “Touchdown confirmed.”

Hoots and hollers rang during NASA’s mission control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, at the moment of contact, but it was not like past landings on Mars. Cheering scientists and engineers jumped off chairs, but the social distance requirements prevented them (mostly) from their usual heartfelt embraces.

This is what a landing on Mars during a global pandemic looks like.

“What an honor for the team,” said Steve Jurczyk, NASA’s acting administrator. “Everything went pretty according to plan.”

In the run-up to touch, astronomers expressed a mixture of excitement and nervousness. “The one thing that is key to a successful mission is a safe landing,” said Glen Nagle, outreach manager of the Australian Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex, which is part of NASA’s network of dishwashers with robots in the air. solar system communicates. “Neither we nor the mission scientists have real control over it.”

The procedure for entry, descent and landing (EDL) is called ‘the seven minutes of terror’ – and with good reason, as many things can go wrong. But perseverance hit the atmosphere at about 12,000 miles per hour and stopped within 420 seconds, a process that NASA has now virtually turned into an art. NASA last landed a rover on Mars in August 2012, when Perseverance’s cousin Curiosity touched on studying carbon-based molecules.

The mission is expected to last one year in Mars, which is equivalent to about 687 Earth Days. But if there’s something about history, NASA can expand it further as it did with the previous time previous rover missions, such as Curiosity.

In the coming days, we can expect to see and hear how the landing took place. NASA’s InSight lander listened from its home position of Elysium Planitia, near the equator of Mars, while perseverance penetrated the slack atmosphere. And the Rover itself is equipped with a range of cameras and a microphone to capture all the fine details. “It’s a new sensory way of dealing with the red planet,” said Alice Gorman, a space archaeologist at Flinders University in Australia. “We can close our eyes, think we are standing on the surface of Mars and listen to the sounds of Mars nature.”

The first images of the Rover was returned to mission control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory a few moments after contact. They were taken by the cameras on the left and right office, two cameras on the front that were aboard the Rover. They are a bit dusty and only image in one band, but they are great.

Then science begins. The goal of perseverance is to usher in a new era of discovery on the red planet. The landing site in the Jezero crater was presumably even covered with water. Where there is water, there is life potential. “These are the kind of conditions where early microbial life began on Earth,” says Brendan Burns, an astrobiologist at the University of New South Wales.

“Percy,” as the rover was affectionately christened, will hopefully discover signs of past life in the crater.

“This mission builds on years of exploration that has shown that Mars was once more habitable than it is today, but perseverance can show whether it is inhabited,” said Alan Duffy, a professor of astrophysics at Swinburne University in Australia.

Ken Farley said during an information session after the touch that the landing site is “a wonderful place to be” because it is right on the border of two “geological units” – it is basically a slap between different types of rock . By crossing this area, you should be able to learn much more about the geological history of Jezero through perseverance.

This is where NASA’s perseverance landed. It is between the boundary of two geological units. “It’s a great place to be,” says Ken Farley, a Caltech project scientist. “It tells you a lot about geological history.” pic.twitter.com/qmbkp6DngU

– Jack Ryan @ (@dctrjack) 18 February 2021

And perseverance goals extend long, long far into the future, with two key components of the mission ready to set the scene for the next missions across the cosmos.

The first is a small helicopter, hidden in the belly of the robber, known as Ingenuity. It is only a test drone, but it may be the first vessel to be flown on another planet. Success in the thin atmosphere of Mars will pave the way for mission to other planets and moons. “If Ingenuity proves that we can successfully operate aircraft on other planets, it will greatly expand exploration options in the future,” said Jonti Horner, an astrophysicist at the University of South Queensland. Horner points to Dragonfly from NASA, which is expected to take Titan to the firmament of Saturn’s moon Titan in 2034.

Back on Mars, perseverance is expected to take soil samples that they can store and leave on the surface for a future Mars mission to collect. This sample yield would be the first of its kind from the red planet. “It’s like the coolest thing ever,” says Bonnie Teece, a doctor. candidate for the Australian Center for Astrobiology. “There are still things we can not do from afar, and questions we can only answer with monsters of Mars here on earth.” A Russia-led monster-return mission was attempted in 2011, but the spacecraft never made it spin.

Persistence launched on 30 July 2020, under the early morning sun off the Florida coast aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V. It has spent the past seven months from Earth to Mars, protected from the harsh environment in the Mars 2020 spacecraft.

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