NASA’s Perseverance Rover successfully lands on the surface

NASA successfully landed its fifth robot rover on Mars on Thursday, with the US space agency confirming that perseverance has safely hit the red planet’s surface.

“Touchdown confirmed,” NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory mission control said. “Perseverance safely on the surface of Mars, ready to begin searching for the sand of past life.”

The rover is the most technologically advanced robot NASA has ever sent to Mars, with the agency aiming to investigate the surface for nearly two years. The agency spent about $ 2.4 billion to build and launch the Perseverance mission, with another $ 300 million in costs expected to land and operate the Rover on the Martian surface.

Based on its predecessor Curiosity, which reached Mars in August 2012 and is still in operation, the Perseverance Rover was built by NASA’s JPL in California. Multiple companies have contributed to parts of the spacecraft, such as the Lockheed Martin heat shield, Aerojet Rocketdyne-built rocket launchers and the Maxar Technologies-built robotic arm.

Perseverance also has a small helicopter called Ingenuity, which NASA plans to launch the first flight on another planet.

The rover is about the size of a small car, weighs a total of one ton and is 10 feet long and nine feet wide and seven feet long. It has a robotic arm that is about seven feet long, the end of which has a robotic hand with a camera, a chemical analyzer and a rock drill. Persistence is powered by nuclear power, with a plutonium generator powered by the U.S. Department of Energy to generate electricity for its few lithium-ion batteries.

Perseverance has traveled 293 million miles to reach Mars in more than six months since launching a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket on July 30.

The landing of the rover had the typical ‘seven minutes of scare’ that NASA engineers describe for any spacecraft attempt to reach the surface of Mars. This is the time it takes to enter the Martian atmosphere and descend to the surface, and it is named as such because it takes 11 minutes for any communication to move from the rover back to Earth, which means that the time delay requires the spacecraft and the rover to land the country autonomously.

Perseverance entered the atmosphere of Mars in a capsule that protected the rover while traveling at about 12,100 miles per hour. The spacecraft then deployed a parachute to begin decelerating before the capsule and heat shield were dropped, and then fired its rocket launchers to decelerate itself from about 170 miles per hour to about two miles per hour.

The spacecraft then deployed its ‘air crane’, which lowered the remaining few feet to the surface.

Perseverance ended up in the Jezero crater, a 28-kilometer basin in the northern hemisphere of Mars. This is a place where NASA believes there was a body of water from Lake Tahoe. NASA’s science team hopes that the ancient river delta may have preserved organic molecules and other possible signs of microbial life, which will try to detect perseverance with its instruments.

In addition to its scientific tools, the rover also carries a memorial plaque in honor of COVID-19 health workers and to pay tribute to the impact of the pandemic.

The Rover also has the names of 10.9 million people stenciled on the Rover in three silicon wafers, with the words “Explore as one” in the Morse code.

The rover is full of cameras to capture its expedition, with the robot crammed with scientific tools to measure the geology of the planet – and hopefully collect samples that NASA intends to return to Earth one day.

NASA plans to drive perseverance to the surface for one Mars year, which is equivalent to 687 days on Earth.

It has seven main instruments for a wide range of purposes: Mastcam-Z, Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA), Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE), Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL), Radar Imager for Mars ‘s underground experiment (RIMFAX), scanning habitable environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals (SHERLOC), and SuperCam.

The rover also has a sample cabinet system with nine drill bits and a large amount of sample collection tubes to capture pieces of the Martian surface for eventual return to Earth.

“Perseverance is the first rover to bring a monster box system to Mars that will pack promising monsters for return to Earth through a future mission,” NASA said in a press release. “Instead of powdering rock like Curiosity’s drill does, Perseverance’s drill will cut intact rock core that is about the size of a piece of chalk and place it in sample tubes that will store it until the rover reaches an appropriate drop-off point on Mars. . ‘

NASA hopes to return the sample sometime in the future as part of a campaign in partnership with the European Space Agency.

The Rover is designed to cover more ground than any other robot previously sent to Mars. NASA has designed perseverance to drive an average of 650 feet per Mars day, which is close to the longest ride previously completed in a day at 702 feet by NASA’s Opportunity Rover.

Perseverance also carries the Ingenuity helicopter. A few months after landing, NASA plans to deploy the helicopter from below Perseverance in a flat area. The rover will then drive about 330 feet further to capture the flight attempt with the cameras of the Rover.

If all goes well, Ingenuity’s flight will be the first powered controlled flight on another planet, according to what NASA describes as a “Wright Brothers moment” on Mars.

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