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The POT this Thursday managed to pose in Mars your exploration vehicle Perseverance, which is the fifth ship to achieve the feat smoothly and the first that aims to respond to the asks if there was life on the red planet.
“It is confirmed that it made landfall,” said Chief of Mission Swati Mohan, after which the headquarters of the Propulsion Craft Laboratory burst into applause.
NASA posted two black-and-white photos taken from the device on Perseverance’s Twitter account, showing the grainy surface of the Jezero crater in the northern hemisphere of Mars.
The mission was a feat since the descent maneuver was very risky due to the relief of the Jezero crater, where NASA sought to position the spacecraft. The scientists baptized the process as “the seven minutes of terror”, due to the uncertainty experienced.
The president of the United States, Joe Biden, celebrated the “historic” feat.
“Congratulations to NASA and everyone who has worked so hard to make the historic arrival of Perseverance possible. “, the president wrote on Twitter.
After entering the atmosphere of Mars at a speed of 20,000 km / h, the temperature rose to 1,300 C °. The vehicle is protected by a heat shield, which triggered the opening of a huge supersonic parachute.
Then its eight engines helped it brake so that it could unfold its six wheels and touch the surface.
The landing was so perfect that Thomas Zurbuchen, Associate Administrator for Science at NASA, highlighted it at the subsequent press conference with a theatrical gesture.
“Every time we land, we have two plans, one that we want to carry out, and a second that is right here,” he said, showing several pages in his hands. “Look what I do with the unforeseen plan,” he said while tearing up those papers, eliciting applause from those present.
NASA promised to publish an unpublished video of Perseverance’s dizzying descent on Monday.
An astrobiologist’s dream
In the next few months the vehicle will try to collect about 30 rocks and soil samples that will be sent back to earth in the 2030s for analysis.
Researchers believe that the Jezero crater housed a lake about 50 km wide for more than 3.5 billion years.
“The question of whether there is life beyond earth it is one of the most fundamental and essential questions we can ask ourselves, ”said NASA geologist Katie Stack Morgan.
“Our ability to ask ourselves this question and develop scientific research and technology to solve it is one of the things that makes us unique as a species,” he added.
Perseverance moves at a maximum speed of 0.16 kilometers per hour, which seems slow, but it surpasses all its predecessors and as it moves it analyzes the soil for organic matter, maps the chemical composition and studies the presence steam.
“Astrobiologists have dreamed of this mission for decades,” said Mary Voytek, program director for this branch of science at NASA.
Getting the rocks back to earth is crucial since a fossil can have a shape similar to the footprint left by rain, for example.
Fly in other worlds
The first months of the mission will not be spent searching for life, but parallel experiments.
NASA wants, in particular, to show that it is possible to fly a motorized vehicle on another planet. The helicopter, dubbed Ingenuity, will try to rise in air with a density equivalent to 1% of that of the Earth’s atmosphere.
Two microphones have the function of recording the sound of the red planet.
NASA will also experiment with oxygen production on Mars. An instrument called MOXIE, the size of a car battery, should be able to produce up to 10 g of oxygen in an hour, sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, in a process similar to that of a plant.
This oxygen could be used for breathing by humans going to Mars in the future, but also as fuel.
Perseverance is the fifth vehicle to land on Martian soil. Since the first, in 1997, all have been Americans, and one of them, Curiosity, continues with its mission on the planet.
China recently placed its “Tianwen-1” probe into the orbit of Mars, which contains a robot that is expected to try to come down in May.
Where I am now? Check out this interactive map to zoom in and explore my landing site: https: //t.co/uPsKFhW17J
And for the ground level view, my first images are here, with many more in the coming days: https: //t.co/Ex1QDo3eC2 pic.twitter.com/B6TJTikAyX
– NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) February 19, 2021
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