NASA’s Mars rover is minutes away from a nail-biting landing attempt

After traveling hundreds of millions of miles in space, the Mars Perseverance rover is just minutes away from attempting to land on the Red Planet in what has been described as one of the most robotic maneuvers bold stories in NASA history.

The car-sized rover, launched in July 2020, aims to land on Mars Thursday around 3:55 p.m. ET. If successful, Perseverance will become NASA’s fifth rover to land on the Red Planet and launch the agency’s most ambitious mission to date: to examine whether life ever existed on Mars.

“Perseverance attempts to answer one of the biggest questions in human history: is there life elsewhere in the solar system?” said Chris Carberry, co-founder and CEO of Explore Mars, a nonprofit that advocates for human exploration of the planet. “If people can’t be excited about this mission, I don’t know what’s wrong with them.”

Carberry said the mission could reveal tantalizing new details about the history and geology of Mars. But first, perseverance must stick to its landing. And it will not be easy.

Like its predecessor, Curiosity, the Perseverance rover’s descent to the Martian surface has been dubbed the “seven minutes of terror”. This is because a complex sequence of scheduled events must occur at specific times for the landing to be successful. And due to the limitations of deep space communication, NASA mission control engineers may not be able to follow in real time.

“Once it enters the atmosphere of Mars, the entire spacecraft acts pretty much autonomously,” said Janet Ivey, president of Explore Mars. “You cannot send a message from Earth to prevent it from landing on a hill or near a large rock. He’s a nail biter for sure.

Only about half of all previous attempts to land a spacecraft on Mars have been successful, according to NASA, and Perseverance’s planned landing is particularly risky.

Once the rover enters Mars’ atmosphere, it will travel at around 20,000 km / h, according to NASA. A parachute will then be deployed and shortly before landing, a “jetpack” will fire a series of retrorockets to slow the spacecraft. A complex celestial crane – similar to the one used when the Curiosity rover landed – will then lower the rover to the Martian surface.

During the agonizing entry and descent phase, the friction of Mars’ atmosphere will also subject the spacecraft to temperatures of over 2,300 degrees Fahrenheit, mission officials said.

The rover aims to settle in Jezero Crater, a 45 km-wide basin just north of the Martian equator that scientists say once housed an ancient river delta. While Mars once supported life billions of years ago, it is believed that Jezero Crater may be the best place to search for potential fossilized clues in the region’s sediments and mineral deposits.

But Jezero’s landscape is also characterized by large fields of boulders, sand dunes, and cliffs that make a landing unpredictable and difficult.

“No landing on Mars is guaranteed, but we have been preparing for a decade to put the wheels of this rover on the surface of Mars and get to work,” said Jennifer Trosper, deputy project manager for the Perseverance mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a statement.

If successful, the Perseverance mission could be the start of a new era of Mars exploration, according to Robert Zubrin, author of “The Case for Mars” and founder of The Mars Society, a nonprofit that aims to advance human missions towards the red planet.

“Perseverance could presumably find fossilized microbial life,” Zubrin said. “If we could drill down, find these microfossils, breed them, and put them through all kinds of testing, we would find out the truth about life in the universe. It’s a powerful thing. “

The mission will also lay the groundwork for future human missions to the Red Planet.

The rover is equipped with a suite of seven tools to study the geology of the planet and the past climate. In addition to the high-power cameras, Perseverance is equipped with a drill and a robotic arm for taking samples, an instrument for examining the chemical composition of rocks and sediments, a tool for measuring the weather on Mars and an experiment to test if oxygen can be produced. of the carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere of Mars.

The rover also carries a helicopter, called Ingenuity, which mission controllers will use to attempt the first controlled flights to another planet. The 4-pound drone is designed to fly and explore nearby areas in and around Jezero Crater.

The Perseverance mission is part of a larger NASA initiative with the European Space Agency that aims to collect rock and sediment samples from Mars and send them back to Earth.

NASA and the European Space Agency are not the only ones targeting Mars. Earlier this month, separate space probes from the United Arab Emirates and China successfully entered orbit around Mars, making it just the fifth and sixth nations to do so.