NASA’s Perseverance rover successfully lands on the surface

NASA managed to successfully land its fifth robotic robot on Mars on Thursday, with the US space agency confirming that Perseverance has landed safely on the surface of the Red Planet.

“Touchdown confirmed,” said NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory mission control. “Safe perseverance on the surface of Mars, ready to begin seeking the sands of past life.”

The rover is the most technologically advanced robot NASA has ever sent to Mars, with the agency aiming to spend nearly two years exploring the surface. The agency spent about $ 2.4 billion to build and launch the Perseverance mission, with an additional $ 300 million planned for landing and operating the rover on the surface of Mars.

Based on its predecessor Curiosity, which reached Mars in August 2012 and is still in operation, the Perseverance rover was built by NASA’s JPL in California. Several companies have contributed parts of the spacecraft, such as the heat shield built by Lockheed Martin, rocket thrusters built by Aerojet Rocketdyne, and the robotic arm built by Maxar Technologies.

Perseverance is also carrying a small helicopter named Ingenuity, which NASA plans to use to attempt the first flight to another planet.

The rover is about the size of a small car, weighs about a ton in total, and is 10 feet long by nine feet wide by seven feet high. It has a robotic arm that reaches about seven feet long, the end of which has a robotic “hand” that has a camera, a chemical analyzer, and a rock drill. Perseverance is nuclear-powered, with a plutonium generator provided by the US Department of Energy to generate electricity for its pair of lithium-ion batteries.

Perseverance has traveled 293 million kilometers to reach Mars in more than six months since a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket launched on July 30.

The rover’s landing featured the typical “seven minutes of terror” that NASA engineers describe for any spacecraft attempt to reach the Martian surface. This is the time it takes to enter the Martian atmosphere and descend to the surface, and it is named as such because it takes 11 minutes for all communication to travel from the rover to Earth – meaning the delay requires the spacecraft and the rover to land autonomously.

Perseverance entered the Martian atmosphere in a capsule that protected the rover as it moved at around 12,100 miles per hour. The spacecraft then deployed a parachute to begin slowing down before dropping the capsule and heat shield, then firing its rocket thrusters to slow down from about 170 miles per hour to about two miles per hour.

The spacecraft then deployed its “celestial crane,” which lowered the rover the remaining few meters to the surface.

Perseverance landed in Jezero Crater, a 45 km-wide basin in the northern hemisphere of Mars. This is a place where NASA believes a body of water, the size of Lake Tahoe, was flowing. The NASA science team is hoping the former river delta may have preserved organic molecules and other potential signs of microbial life, which Perseverance will attempt to detect with its instruments.

In addition to its scientific instruments, the rover also carries a commemorative plaque to honor COVID-19 healthcare workers and pay tribute to the impact of the pandemic.

The rover also has the names of 10.9 million people stenciled into three silicon chips on the rover, with the words “Explore Like One” written in Morse code.

The rover is packed with cameras to capture its expedition, with the robot packed with scientific instruments to measure the planet’s geology – and hopefully collect samples that NASA aims to someday return to Earth.

NASA plans to propel Perseverance to the surface for one Martian year, which equates to 687 days on Earth.

It has seven major instruments for a wide variety of uses: Mastcam-Z, Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA), Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE), Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL), Radar Imager for Underground Mars Experiment (RIMFAX), Digitization of Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organic and Chemicals (SHERLOC) and SuperCam.

The rover also has a sample caching system, which includes nine different drills and a host of sample collection tubes to capture pieces of the surface of Mars for eventual return to Earth.

“Perseverance is the first rover to bring a sample caching system to Mars that will pack promising samples for return to Earth on a future mission,” NASA said in a press release. “Rather than pulverizing rock like Curiosity’s drill does, Perseverance’s drill will cut intact rock cores that are roughly the size of a piece of chalk and place them in sample tubes it will store until the rover reaches an appropriate drop-off location. March. “

NASA hopes to return the sample as part of a campaign in partnership with the European Space Agency in the future.

The rover is designed to cover more ground than any other robot sent to Mars before. NASA designed Perseverance to travel an average of 650 feet per Martian day, which is close to the longest trip previously made in a day at 702 feet by NASA’s Opportunity rover.

Perseverance also carries the Ingenuity helicopter. A few months after landing, NASA plans to deploy the helicopter under Perseverance in a flat area. The rover will then drive at around 330 feet, to capture the attempted flight with the rover’s cameras.

If all goes well, Ingenuity’s flight will be the first powered controlled flight to another planet, in what NASA describes as “a Wright Brothers moment” on Mars.

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