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WASHINGTON – NASA’s Mars 2020 rover is on track for a landing next month that will seriously begin returning samples from the planet to Earth.
The spacecraft, launched on July 30, is expected to land in Jezero Crater at 3:55 p.m. EST on February 18. It will surface the Perseverance rover, a vehicle similar to the Curiosity rover that landed in 2012 but with a different sequel. instruments and other improvements.
“Everything is fine. The spacecraft is healthy, the subsystems are functioning nominally, and the team is making final preparations for EDL and initial surface operations, ”said Eric Ianson, director of the NASA Mars Exploration Program. , at a January 27 meeting of the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (MEPAG).
EDL refers to the entry, descent, and landing, known as “seven minutes of terror” when the spacecraft enters the Martian atmosphere and slows down to allow the rover to land safely. This process is similar to that used by Curiosity, but with some improvements.
One of those is the “scope trigger,” Allen Chen, EDL official for March 2020, said during a press briefing on Jan. 27. “With the range trigger, we gave Perseverance the ability to decide for itself when to deploy the parachute based on where it is,” he said, allowing for a more precise landing.
The second is terrain-related navigation, giving the lander “eyes and a map,” he said. The spacecraft will use cameras to take images of the terrain as it descends and compare them to an onboard map. “Once she understands where she is, she can fly to a safe place nearby,” he said, further improving the accuracy of the landing.
Both technologies are essential, Chen said, for the mission to go to Jezero Crater. “When I look at it from the landing point of view, I see the danger,” he says, such as sheer cliffs, sand, boulders and impact craters. “Without the range trigger and relative terrain navigation, we just couldn’t go to Jezero.”
This location is appealing to scientists as it appears to have been a lake in the early days of the planet’s history and may contain evidence of past Martian life preserved in carbonate deposits left behind. “I very much appreciate the efforts of the engineering team to get us to a dangerous landing site,” Ken Farley, Mars 2020 Project Scientist, said during the briefing. “It’s a spectacular landing site.”
A key part of the mission will be to collect samples from the Jezero crater. March 2020 is the start of a larger Mars sample return program, in which Perseverance will cache samples that will be collected and returned to Earth in two subsequent missions that will not launch until 2026.
This sample collection work will not begin immediately. Farley said it would take some time to check the rover’s instruments, which will also be used for flight tests of Ingenuity, a small helicopter that hitchhikes the rover. “All of this will take several months, during which time science is not the main focus of the mission,” he said. “As soon as we are done with this phase, we are ready to start.”
Project scientists are also developing the strategy for determining which samples to collect, given that the rover only has about three dozen sample collection tubes. Michael Meyer, the principal scientist for the Mars exploration program at NASA, told the MEPAG meeting that 255 people attended a caching strategy workshop last week, with a report on those plans. scheduled for mid-February.
The first samples collected by Perseverance would be back on Earth in 2031, assuming future Mars sample return missions launch on their current schedule, but Farley said it will be worth the wait.
“The samples will return to Earth in the 2030s,” he said. “They will be analyzed for decades after that. This means that the scientists who are currently part of the Mars 2020 science team are unlikely to be the ones who analyze the same thing. Scientists who will analyze these samples are at school today. They may not even have been born yet.
But first, Perseverance must land on Mars. Chen said the mission team is completing the final checks of the lander’s EDL system, then will perform a “cold start” of its computer system to ensure it is in the same condition as its counterparts on. the terrain used for testing. “We want to make sure that we drive the vehicle as we have tested it,” he said.
Later updates will fine-tune the lander’s trajectory and give the spacecraft more precise information about its position. In the last week before landing, he added, “It’s about making sure we’re all ready and in the best position to be successful, almost literally, for EDL.
Landing activities will be a little different from previous missions, which included a packed mission control room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that erupted into celebrations after receiving information about successful landings. The ongoing pandemic, Chen said, means there will be fewer people in the room, and with dividers and other protective gear in place.
“We need to put in these protective protocols to protect each other,” said Matt Wallace, deputy project manager for March 2020. “But assuming we have confirmation of the landing, I don’t think COVID will be able to to stop jumping up and down and banging our fists. You’re going to see a lot of happy people no matter what, once we get this thing to the surface safely.
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