The wanderer has been traveling through space since starting in late July from Cape Canaveral, Florida. When it reaches Mars, endurance will have traveled 292.5 million miles on its journey from Earth.
Perseverance is NASA’s first mission to look for signs of ancient life on another planet to answer the big question: Was there ever life on Mars? The wanderer will explore the Jezero crater, the site of an ancient lake that existed 3.9 billion years ago, and search for microfossils in the rocks and soil there.
Along with the ride with Perseverance is an experiment to fly a helicopter called Ingenuity for the first time on another planet.
Here’s what you can expect this week.
How to watch
Unfortunately, we can not watch the rover land on the surface of Mars – we are not technologically there yet.
NASA’s mission control team will be able to confirm during the landing cover whether the rover landed safely on the surface of Mars.
“If there is one thing we know, it is never easy to land on Mars,” Marc Etkind, a communications rival at NASA, said in a statement. “But as NASA’s fifth Mars rover, Perseverance has an extraordinary engineering tribe and mission team.”
Only a few weeks after landing, cameras and microphones on the spacecraft will show the perspective of the rover for the first time.
Land on Mars: ‘7 minutes scared’
If successful, throughput would be NASA’s ninth landing on Mars. First, it has to go through the infamous ‘seven minutes of scare’.
The one-way time it takes for radio signals to travel from Earth to Mars is about 10.5 minutes, which means that the seven minutes it takes before the spacecraft lands on Mars, without any help or intervention from NASA teams on Earth .
The ground crews tell the spacecraft when to start with EDL (boarding, disembarking and landing) and the spacecraft takes over from there – and mission control begins a tormenting wait.
This rover is the heaviest NASA has ever attempted to land, weighing more than a ton.
The spacecraft hits the top of the Martian atmosphere moving at 12,000 miles per hour, and must slow down to zero miles per hour seven minutes later when the rover gently lands on the surface.
The heat shield of the spacecraft will withstand a peak heat of 2370 degrees Fahrenheit 75 seconds after it enters the atmosphere.
Perseverance is focused on an ancient lake bed and a 28-kilometer river delta, the most challenging place yet for a NASA spacecraft landing on Mars. Instead of being flat and slippery, the small landing site is littered with sand dunes, steep cliffs, rocks and small craters. The spacecraft has two upgrades – called Range Trigger and Terrain-Relative Navigation – to navigate this difficult and dangerous terrain.
Range Trigger will tell the 70.5-foot-wide parachute when it needs to be adjusted to the position of the spacecraft 240 seconds after entering the atmosphere. After the parachute is deployed, the heat shield will come loose.
The terrain-related navigation of the rover acts like a second brain and uses cameras to take photos of the ground as it approaches quickly and determines the safest place to land. According to NASA, it could move the landing site by up to 2,000 feet.
The rear shell and the parachute separate after the heat shield is thrown away – this will happen if the spacecraft is 2.2 km above the Martian surface. The Mars landing engines, which include eight runways, will burn to slow down the descent from 190 miles per hour to about 1.7 miles per hour.
Then the famous crane maneuver that landed the Curiosity Rover will take place. Nylon cords lower the rover 25 feet below the drop point. After the rover touches the surface of Mars, the ropes will come loose and the downhill road will fly away and land at a safe distance.
The mission: What the rover will do
Once the rover has landed, Perseverance’s two-year mission begins. First, it goes through a “settlement period” to make sure it is ready.
Perseverance will search for evidence of ancient life and study Mars’ climate and geology and collect samples that will eventually return to Earth by the 2030s.
For this reason, perseverance is also the cleanest machine ever sent to Mars, designed so that it does not contaminate the Mars monsters with any microbes of the earth that could give a false reading.
The Jezero Crater was chosen as the home of Perseverance because the basin was the site of a lake and river delta billions of years ago. Rocks and dirt from this basin can provide petrified evidence of microbial life in the past, as well as more information about how ancient Mars was.
“Perseverance’s sophisticated scientific tools will not only help hunt the petrified microbial life, but also expand our knowledge of the geology of Mars and the past, present and future,” said Ken Farley, project scientist for Mars 2020, said in a statement.
The road to perseverance is about 15 kilometers long, an ‘epic journey’ that will take years, Farley said. What scientists have been able to discover about Mars, however, is worth the trip. To achieve its goals, perseverance will drive a little less than 0.1 miles per hour, three times faster than previous rovers.
Perseverance also carries tools that could explore further on Mars in the future, such as MOXIE, the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment. This experiment, about the size of a car battery, will try to convert Mars’ carbon dioxide into oxygen.
This could not only help NASA scientists produce rocket fuel on Mars, but also oxygen that could be used during future human exploration of the red planet.
Ingenuity, the first helicopter on another planet
Perseverance does not travel to Mars by itself. Along with the ride is Ingenuity, which will be the first helicopter to fly on another planet.
After landing, the rover will also find a nice, flat surface to drop the Ingenuity helicopter so that it can be a place to use as a helicopter for its potential five test flights over a period of 30 days. This will take place within the first 50 to 90 sols, or Mars days, of the mission.
Once Ingenuity is established on the surface, Perseverance will drive a distance to a safe place and use its cameras to view Ingenuity’s flight.
Speed weighs only 4 kilograms and features four carbon fiber blades, solar cells and batteries.
Mars has an incredibly thin atmosphere, so the design for Ingenuity had to be lightweight, while including larger and faster rotors than those of typical helicopters on Earth to get it into the air.
If Ingenuity is successful, it could pave the way for more advanced robotic aircraft on future missions to Mars, both robotic and human, according to NASA.