Thursday is the big day. NASA’s million-dollar Mars rover will arrive at the red planet and begin the process of trying to land safely on the surface almost immediately.
This is easier said then done. As Mars approaches, the Perseverance Rover will shake off its sailing phase and retain only an air cap to protect itself and a downhill run. This decelerated spacecraft will hit the atmosphere at about 20,000 km / h and has only 410 seconds – or almost seven minutes – to lighten this speed and make a feathery touch.
How to land on Mars
Although the Martian atmosphere is thin, it will nonetheless offer a majority of the resistance to retard endurance. Within about 80 seconds of entering the Martian atmosphere, the temperature outside the aerial disk is expected to reach 1,300 ° Celsius.
About four minutes after encountering the atmosphere, the parachutes of the vehicle will deploy. Soon after, the protective aeroshell will fall away, doing its job. If the vehicle then descends to about 4 km above the planet’s surface, it will activate its Terrain Navigation System. Up to this point, Perseverance’s journey will be very similar to that of the Curiosity rover, which underwent a similar “seven minutes of scare” during the successful landing in August 2012.
NASA / JPL-Caltech
With perseverance, there’s one major difference – while Curiosity has been looking for a safe landing site in the relatively slippery terrain of the Gale crater, this spacecraft will end up in a more dangerous place with rocks, the Jezero crater. This location should provide a richer scientific exploration. To reduce this risk, engineers have added a new system to enable a more accurate landing.
As it decreases, an on-board computer will quickly begin taking photos of the Martian surface, looking for features such as craters, cliffs and large rocks to compare with previously captured orbital images. After the on-board computer has made 15 rural “matches”, it will switch to a higher resolution image mode to refine the landing position. Curiosity could estimate at about 3 km where it was on Mars. Perseverance will reduce this error by 40 meters.
After reaching an altitude of 2 km, the rover starts with a driven descent, followed by the “skycrane” maneuver to put throughput on Mars at a speed of less than 1 m / s.
When will we know that perseverance made it? Cameras on board the spacecraft will record its descent, but there is no ability to transmit this data in real time, and it will be sent a few days later. Because there is currently an 11-minute delay between Earth and Mars, we will only know the fate of the spacecraft after it has hit (or left a smoke hole in the surface of Mars). Touch is scheduled for approximately 15:55 EST (20:55 UTC). With luck, a signal from the spacecraft will arrive on earth telling us that it is going well.
NASA television offers live coverage on all regular locations starting at 14:15 EST (19:15 UTC) Thursday. So many people at NASA and in the industry worked extraordinarily hard to make a success on Thursday. Let’s hope they’re rewarded.
A very complex mission
Perseverance has a lot in common with curiosity in other ways. They are built from the same design and have very common parts. But NASA learned from Curiosity about the performance of the vehicle on Mars – such as the need for more durable aluminum wheels – and therefore NASA was able to push Perseverance further.
Scientists believe, for example, that the Jezero crater region was once a delta and that ancient sediments have been preserved. Perseverance has a laser-based spectroscopy system to search for bio-signatures in the past.
The rover also contains an intricate system that will collect dozens of samples of the Martian rocks and store them in memory in the hope that a future NASA mission to Mars will pick up the samples and bring them back to Earth. NASA and the European Space Agency are working on a joint mission that would return these rocks in 2031, but it is not fully funded.
Ultimately, of course, the Perseverance Mission will bring the smallest Ingenuity helicopter to the red planet. It will try to demonstrate the first car flight in another world. It may not work – the Martian atmosphere is very thin, so it will be a challenge to produce any elevator – but it’s great to see NASA take such risks that will only drive our space adventures further to greater heights.