Perseverance Rover will arrive at Mars with a bang: How NASA will listen

When NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover lands on the surface of the red planet On Thursday, it will carry a microphone that will hopefully be able to capture the sounds of its descent and touch. But it will not be the only device listening to the arrival of the rover.

The Lander from Mars Insight is located less than 3000 kilometers from Jezero crater, where endurance will land. Unlike the more charismatic robbers designed to explore the landscape of Mars, one of Insight’s primary tasks is simply to sit in one place and listen to marsquakes and other seismic activities.

Insight has already managed to detect marsquakes. But as the one-time seismic detection station on the planet, the scientific team has struggled to determine the location and magnitude of the earthquakes. This is easier to do on Earth, where there is a whole network of seismic sensors that make it easier to calibrate and calculate the details of a certain earthquake.

Now scientists are hoping to use the landing of Perseverance to get a better picture of the inner structure of Mars and how seismic waves propagate through it. The hope is that Insight will be able to record different phases of the landing with its sensors. In essence, this will be the first time that Insight will ‘hear’ an ‘earthquake’ and also know exactly where it’s coming from. This critical data will enable researchers to hone their models of the Martian interior and calibrate Insight’s seismic detection forces.

“Fortunately, the import, descent and landing of the Perseverance Rover are so energetic that it produces signals that are observable with seismometers,” writes Ben Fernando, a member of the Insight science team, for The Conversation.

The real touch of perseverance is a soft landing that may not be noticeable over a long distance, but the more energetic parts of the process refer to Fernando to include the sonic boom of the spacecraft while slowing down during the descent, and the impact of two large weights called Cruise Mass Balance Devices, or CMBDs.

Fernando and his colleagues calculated the signals that could be produced from the sonic surge, and found it unlikely that it would be detectable by Insight. However, the 70 kilograms CMBDs will be braided more than 1000 kilometers above the surface of Mars and will have to produce small craters if they hit the planet at a high speed.

“It will transfer a large amount of energy into the ground, which will produce seismic waves,” Fernando explains. “We estimated that these signals ‘at best’ would be ‘loud’ about ‘40% of the time’ enough to be detected by InSight’s seismometers. The uncertainties of our estimates are significant, mainly because no one has ever tried to. to detect an impact. event at these distances before. ”

No matter how well it works, even an attempt to track down a spacecraft landing on Mars with another probe will be the first.

Make sure you keep up with all our coverage of the arrival of Perseverance to Mars, which takes place on Thursday at 12:55 PT.

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