Los Angeles:
When NASA’s Mars rover Perseverance, a robotic astrobiology lab packed inside a space capsule, hits the final stretch of its seven-month journey from Earth this week, it is set to emit a radio alert as it streaks into the thin Martian atmosphere.
By the time that signal reaches mission managers some 127 million miles (204 million km) away at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) close to Los Angeles, Perseverance will currently have landed on the Red Planet – hopefully in one piece.
The six-wheeled rover is anticipated to take seven minutes to descend from the major of the Martian atmosphere to the planet’s surface in much less time than the 11-minute-plus radio transmission to Earth. Thus, Thursday’s final, self-guided descent of the rover spacecraft is set to take place for the duration of a white-knuckled interval that JPL engineers affectionately refer to as the “seven minutes of terror.”
Al Chen, head of the JPL descent and landing group, known as it the most essential and most hazardous portion of the $2.7 billion mission.
“Success is never assured,” Chen told a current news briefing. “And that’s especially true when we’re trying to land the biggest, heaviest and most complicated rover we’ve ever built to the most dangerous site we’ve ever attempted to land at.”
Much is riding on the outcome. Building on discoveries of almost 20 U.S. outings to Mars dating back to Mariner 4’s 1965 flyby, Perseverance may perhaps set the stage for scientists to conclusively show no matter if life has existed beyond Earth, whilst paving the way for eventual human missions to the fourth planet from the sun. A protected landing, as generally, comes very first.
Success will hinge on a complicated sequence of events unfolding with no a hitch – from inflation of a giant, supersonic parachute to deployment of a jet-powered “sky crane” that will descend to a protected landing spot and hover above the surface whilst lowering the rover to the ground on a tether.
“Perseverance has to do this all on her own,” Chen mentioned. “We can’t help it during this period.”
If all goes as planned, NASA’s group would get a adhere to-up radio signal shortly just before 1 p.m. Pacific time confirming that Perseverance landed on Martian soil at the edge of an ancient, lengthy-vanished river delta and lake bed.
SCIENCE ON THE SURFACE
From there, the nuclear battery-powered rover, roughly the size of a compact SUV, will embark on the principal objective of its two-year mission – engaging a complicated suite of instruments in the search for indicators of microbial life that may perhaps have flourished on Mars billions of years ago.
Advanced energy tools will drill samples from Martian rock and seal them into cigar-sized tubes for eventual return to Earth for additional evaluation – the very first such specimens ever collected by humankind from the surface of one more planet.
Two future missions to retrieve these samples and fly them back to Earth are in the arranging stages by NASA, in collaboration with the European Space Agency.
Perseverance, the fifth and by far most sophisticated rover automobile NASA has sent to Mars due to the fact Sojourner in 1997, also incorporates a number of pioneering options not straight connected to astrobiology.
Among them is a compact drone helicopter, nicknamed Ingenuity, that will test surface-to-surface powered flight on one more globe for the very first time. If productive, the 4-pound (1.8-kg) whirlybird could pave the way for low-altitude aerial surveillance of Mars for the duration of later missions.
Another experiment is a device to extract pure oxygen from carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere, a tool that could prove invaluable for future human life help on Mars and for creating rocket propellant to fly astronauts dwelling.
‘SPECTACULAR’ BUT TREACHEROUS
The mission’s very first hurdle following a 293-million-mile (472-million-km) flight from Earth is delivering the rover intact to the floor of Jerezo Crater, a 28-mile-wide (45-km-wide) expanse that scientists think may perhaps harbor a wealthy trove of fossilized microorganisms.
“It is a spectacular landing site,” project scientist Ken Farley told reporters on a teleconference.
What tends to make the crater’s rugged terrain – deeply carved by lengthy-vanished flows of liquid water – so tantalizing as a analysis web-site also tends to make it treacherous as a landing zone.
The descent sequence, an upgrade from NASA’s final rover mission in 2012, starts as Perseverance, encased in a protective shell, pierces the Martian atmosphere at 12,000 miles per hour (19,300 km per hour), almost 16 instances the speed of sound on Earth.
After a parachute deployment to slow its plunge, the descent capsule’s heat shield is set to fall away to release a jet-propelled “sky crane” hovercraft with the rover attached to its belly.
Once the parachute is jettisoned, the sky crane’s jet thrusters are set to promptly fire, slowing its descent to walking speed as it nears the crater floor and self-navigates to a smooth landing web-site, steering clear of boulders, cliffs and sand dunes.
Hovering more than the surface, the sky crane is due to reduce Perseverance on nylon tethers, sever the chords when the rover’s wheels attain the surface, then fly off to crash a protected distance away.
Should every little thing work, deputy project manager Matthew Wallace mentioned, post-landing exuberance would be on complete show at JPL regardless of COVID-19 security protocols that have kept close contacts inside mission manage to a minimum.
“I don’t think COVID is going to be able to stop us from jumping up and down and fist-bumping,” Wallace mentioned.
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