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The rover, which is the largest and most advanced rover ever built by NASA, will act as a robotic geologist, collecting soil and rock samples that will eventually be returned to Earth by the 2030s.
For this reason, Perseverance is also the cleanest machine ever sent to Mars, designed not to contaminate Martian samples with microbes from Earth, providing a false reading.
Mission teams have made many changes due to the pandemic, but they have adapted to work safely and efficiently. The team that will be at JPL during the landing carried out an adapted simulation of the landing which took place last week over three days.
“Don’t let anyone tell you different – landing on Mars is hard to do,” John McNamee, project manager for the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission at JPL, said in a statement. “But the men and women on this team are the best in the world at what they do. When our spacecraft reaches the top of Mars’ atmosphere at about three and a half miles per second, we’ll be ready.”
Perseverance is the last step in NASA’s long history of exploring the Red Planet. It builds on lessons learned from previous missions with new objectives that will further illuminate the history of Mars.
“NASA has been exploring Mars since Mariner 4 conducted an overflight in July 1965, with two more overflights, seven successful orbiters and eight landers since then,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Missions Directorate, said in a statement.
“Perseverance, which was built from the collective knowledge gleaned from these pioneers, has an opportunity not only to expand our knowledge of the Red Planet, but also to investigate one of the most important questions and fascinating stories about the origin of life on Earth. and also on other planets. “
NASA teams call this the “seven minutes of terror”.
And just weeks after landing, video cameras and microphones on the spacecraft will show the rover’s perspective on this heartbreaking experience.
‘Seven minutes of terror’
The one-way illumination time required for radio signals to travel from Earth to Mars is approximately 10.5 minutes, meaning that the seven minutes required for the spacecraft to land on Mars will occur without any assistance. or intervention of NASA teams on Earth.
These are the “seven minutes of terror”. Ground crews tell the spacecraft when to start the EDL (entry, descent, and landing) and the spacecraft takes over from there.
It’s no exaggeration to say that this is the most critical and dangerous part of the mission, according to Allen Chen, March 2020 Entry, Descent, and Landing at JPL.
“There is no guarantee that we will be successful,” Zurbuchen admitted. However, the mission teams did everything to prepare for a successful landing.
This rover is the heaviest NASA has ever attempted to land, weighing over a metric ton.
The spacecraft reaches the top of the Martian atmosphere traveling at 12,000 miles per hour and is expected to slow down to zero miles per hour seven minutes later when the rover gently lands on the surface.
It will cross the Martian sky like a meteor, Chen said.
About 10 minutes before entering the thin Martian atmosphere, the cruise stage that carried the spacecraft on its journey into space is abandoned and the rover prepares for a guided entry, where small thrusters on the aeroshell help to adjust its angle.
The spacecraft’s heat shield will experience a maximum heating of 2370 degrees Fahrenheit, 75 seconds after entering the atmosphere.
Perseverance targets an ancient lake bed and a 28-mile-wide river delta, the most difficult site yet for a NASA spacecraft landing on Mars. Rather than being flat and smooth, the small landing site is littered with sand dunes, sheer cliffs, boulders, and small craters.
The spacecraft has two upgrades – called Range Trigger and Terrain-Relative Navigation – to navigate this difficult and dangerous site.
Range Trigger will tell the 70.5-foot-wide parachute when to deploy based on the position of the spacecraft 240 seconds after entering the atmosphere. Once the parachute is deployed, the heat shield will detach.
The rover’s terrain-relative navigation acts like a second brain, using cameras to take photos of the ground on the fast approach and determine the safest place to land. It can move the landing point up to 2,000 feet, according to NASA.
The rear hull and parachute separate after the heat shield is thrown when the spacecraft is 1.3 miles above the Martian surface. The Mars landing engines, which include eight retrorockets, will fire to slow the descent from 190 miles per hour to about 1.7 miles per hour.
Then the famous Celestial Crane maneuver that landed the Curiosity rover will occur. The nylon cords will lower the rover to 25 feet below the descent level. Once the rover touches the Martian surface, the cords will break off and the descent stage will fly away and land at a safe distance.
On the surface of Mars
Once the rover lands, Perseverance’s two-year mission will begin, and it will go through a “check-in” period to make sure it’s ready.
The rover will also find a nice flat surface to drop the Ingenuity helicopter so it can use it as a helipad for its five potential test flights over a 30-day period. This will happen in the first 50 to 90 sols, or Martian days, of the mission.
Once Ingenuity is installed on the surface, Perseverance will go remotely and use its cameras to watch Ingenuity’s flight.
It will be the first flight of a helicopter on another planet.
After these flights, Perseverance will begin to search for evidence of ancient life, study the climate and geology of Mars, and collect samples that will eventually be returned to Earth via planned future missions. It will drive three times faster than previous rovers.
Jezero Crater was chosen as the home of Perseverance because billions of years ago the basin was the site of a lake and a river delta. The rocks and dirt in this basin could provide fossilized evidence of past microbial life, as well as more information on what ancient Mars looked like.
“Perseverance’s sophisticated scientific instruments will not only aid in the hunt for fossilized microbial life, but will also expand our knowledge of Martian geology and its past, present and future,” said Ken Farley, project scientist for March 2020, in a statement.
“Our science team has been very busy planning the best way to work with what we anticipate to be an advanced data fire. This is the kind of ‘problem’ we look forward to. ”
The path Perseverance has traveled is approximately 15 miles long, an “epic journey” that will take years, Farley said. What scientists might find on Mars, however, is worth seeing.
Perseverance is also carrying instruments that could help explore further Mars in the future, such as MOXIE, the experiment in using Mars’ in situ oxygen resources. This experiment, the size of a car battery, will attempt to convert Martian carbon dioxide into oxygen.
This could not only help NASA scientists learn how to produce rocket fuel on Mars, but also oxygen that could be used in future human exploration of the Red Planet.
“The mission brings hope and unity,” Zurbuchen said. “As a cosmic neighbor, Mars continues to capture our imaginations.”
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