NASA Rover experiences "seven minutes of terror" before landing on Mars

NASA

 

NASA Rover experiences "seven minutes of terror" before landing on Mars

By the time that signal reaches task managers about 127 million miles (204 million kilometers) away at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) near Los Angeles, the persistence will have already landed on the red planet - and hopefully, one piece.

Los Angeles:

When NASA's Mars spacecraft (Perseverance), a robotic astrobiology laboratory packed inside a space capsule, reaches the final stage of its seven-month journey from Earth this week, it is set to emit a radio alert as it flows into the thin atmosphere of Mars.

By the time that signal reaches task managers about 127 million miles (204 million kilometers) away at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) near Los Angeles, the persistence will have already landed on the red planet - and hopefully, one piece.

The six-wheeled spacecraft is expected to take seven minutes to descend from the top of the Martian atmosphere to the surface of the planet in less time than the radio transmission time of over 11 minutes to Earth. Thus, the autonomous landing of the spacecraft is scheduled to take place on Thursday during a time interval that JPL engineers affectionately refer to as "seven minutes of terror".

Al Chen, head of the JPL landing and landing team, described it as the riskiest and most dangerous part of the $ 2.7 billion mission.

"Success is never guaranteed," Chen said in a recent press release. "This is especially true when we're trying to take down the largest, heaviest, and most complex rover we've built at the most dangerous site we've ever attempted to land."

Much depends on the outcome. Building on the discoveries of nearly 20 American trips to Mars dating back to the 1965 Mariner 4 flight, perseverance may pave the way for scientists to definitively show whether life exists outside Earth, while paving the way for eventual human missions to the fourth planet from the Sun. A safe landing, as always, comes first.

Success will hinge on a complex series of events unfolding without hindrance - from the inflating of a giant supersonic parachute to the deployment of a jet-powered "sky lift" that will descend to a safe landing point and hover above the surface while the rover is lowered to the ground on a rope.

"Perseverance should do all this alone," Chen said. "We cannot help her during this period."

If all goes as planned, the NASA team will receive a radio tracking signal shortly before one in the afternoon. Pacific Time confirms that the Perseverance has landed on Mars soil at the edge of an ancient and long-vanished river delta and lake bed.

Science is on the surface

From there, the battery-powered vehicle, roughly the size of a small SUV, will begin the primary goal of its two-year mission - to engage a complex array of tools in the search for signs of microbial life that may have flourished on Mars billions of years ago.

Advanced electrical tools will drill samples of Martian rocks and seal them into tubes the size of cigars to eventually return them to Earth for further analysis - the first such samples humanity has ever collected from the surface of another planet.

There are two future missions to recover these samples and return them to Earth, and they are in the planning stages by NASA, in cooperation with the European Space Agency.

Perseverance, the fifth and most advanced spacecraft that NASA has sent to Mars since Sojourner in 1997, also includes many groundbreaking features that are not directly related to space biology.