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NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover is scheduled to land on the Red Planet on Thursday.
Perseverance is the agency’s fifth rover to Mars, and engineers running the mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in southern California wrote in a press release Tuesday that the rover was on track to descend to Jezero de Mars crater around 3:55 p.m. EST.
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Scientists chose the 28-mile-wide crater after a five-year study of over 60 potential sites because they believe the crater was once inundated with water and was home to a former river delta more than 3 years ago. 5 billion years.
Landing on Mars is risky and about half of all previous Mars landing attempts have been successful. The topography of Jezero Crater – which also includes cliffs, sand dunes, and boulder fields – only increases the difficulty of the mission.
CAP CANAVERAL, FLORIDA, UNITED STATES – 2020/07/30: An Atlas V rocket with NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover is launched from pad 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Station. The Mars 2020 mission plans to land the Perseverance rover on the Red Planet in February 2021, where it will look for signs of ancient life and collect rock and soil samples for a possible return to Earth. (Photo by Paul Hennessy / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images)
This time, however, the Perseverance team would “use new technology” in order to be able to target the rover’s landing site more precisely.
That said, there is a lot of room for error – especially during the so-called “Seven Minutes of Terror”.
The spacecraft flying Perseverance will separate from its entry capsule, enter the atmosphere of the planet traveling at around 12,100 mph, deploy its parachute at supersonic speed, detach the bottom of the entry capsule allowing use radar and Terrain-Relative navigation, will separate the reverse half of the capsule and deploy the rover’s “jetpack”, and touchdown using the celestial crane maneuver at human walking speed.
It’s a dance with precise steps, but a multitude of factors can impact the timing of landing, including atmospheric conditions and the complexity of deep space communications – although persistence could land without communications with Earth.
Once on Mars, the rover will photograph its new home – returning images to Earth via NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter – and ultimately attempt to document evidence of ancient microbial life on Mars.
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The mission carries more cameras than any interplanetary mission in history, with 19 on the rover and four on other parts of the spacecraft.
It will also be the first mission to collect and hide Martian rocks and sediments for later return to Earth.
Perseverance also carries a helicopter named Ingenuity: the first aircraft to attempt powered, controlled flight to another planet.
As the most advanced rover to date, Perseverance has been named for a specific purpose, and to the right of the middle wheel is a plaque that commemorates the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and pays tribute to the workers of the health of the whole world.
To watch the landing and listen to expert commentary, viewers can tune into NASA TV at 2:15 p.m. ET.
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“This landing is one of those pivotal moments for NASA, the United States and space exploration around the world – when we know we’re about to make discoveries and sharpen our pencils, so say, to rewrite the textbooks, ”Acting Administrator Steve Jurczyk told Fox News.
“The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission embodies our nation’s spirit of perseverance, even in the most difficult of situations, inspiring and advancing science and exploration. The mission itself embodies the human ideal of persevering into the future and will help us prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet in the 2030s, ”he said.
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