NASA, to run in space at speeds over 12,000 miles Mars Rover Mars arrived on Thursday and took a thrilling seven-minute dip passing through the atmosphere Land On the surface of the red planet to see evidence of past microbial life in the remains of an ancient lake.
“Touchdown has been confirmed! Drata is safe on the surface of Mars, which is starting to find signs of past life!” The guidance, navigation and control officer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory called the monitoring telemetry Swati Mohan as soon as the rover came down. Happily, if there is a social distance, the flight engineers are cheered and clapped, giving way to relief in the joy of the uncomfortable moment.
NASA
The relief was understandable. Often described as “seven minutes of terror”, the Rover’s descent a Nail-bite sequence To get a 2,260-pound rover safely down the ancient lake in the Jessero Crater, computer-orchestrated make-or-break events that worked in a near-perfect fashion, avoiding dangerous rocks, large boulders, and sandbags in the process.
And 4 2.4 billion rovers did the same.
“I almost feel like I’m in a dream,” said Jennifer Trosper, deputy project manager. “Our job is to think about all the bad things that can happen and try to avoid them, and when all the good things happen you feel like you’re dreaming. And I feel like I’m dreaming. “
President Biden Tweeted: “Congratulations to NASA and everyone whose hard work made the historic landing possible.”
At 4:48 p.m., the rover hit the top of the discreet Martin atmosphere and quickly became agitated in the glare of atmospheric friction, its protective heat shield with a survival temperature of 40,000 degrees – high – hot enough to melt stainless steel – and its The braking force is 10 times the gravity of the earth.
Slowly at 1000 miles per hour, it deploys a 70.5-foot-wide giant parachute into the supersonic slipstream to identify hazards and use a state-of-the-art guidance system to get out of a safe landing. Jezero crater floor.
Then, less than a minute after the touchdown, at an altitude of about 2.1 miles, Perseverance was released from his parachute while descending about 200 miles. Seconds later, eight engines in a rocket-powered backpack fired, lowering the craft to less than 2 miles per hour until it reached the expected itude of feet0 or more.
At that point, the drop was lowered towards the suspended surface by the tatters while the jet pack continued to descend. At 3:55 p.m., the rover’s six wheels froze on the surface, cut the tethers, and the “sky crane” backpack crashed at a safe distance.
“Hello, World,” Perseverance tweeted “Shortly after landing, posted the first image of the rover at its landing site. “My first look at my forever home.”
About a minute before the touchdown, as seen by Jezero Crater, the Earth descended below the horizon, cutting off the Earth’s X-band radio signals directly from the Persuasion. But UHF signals confirming the landing were relayed to JPL by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which was passing overhead.
“Sky crane maneuvers have begun. At an altitude of about 20 meters above the surface,” Mohan reported as the rover approached the landing.
One engineer reported, “We are still getting signals from the MRO
“Touchdown confirmed!” Mohan called a moment later.
Moments later, the first image of one of the rover’s dangerous cameras appeared, showing a relatively flat surface without any large boulders or other obstacles in sight. “Yes! Hu hu!” The engineer emerges as he flips through the photo in the controlroom display
NASA / JPL-Caltech
The rover’s automatic descent seems futile as multiple cameras, radar and other sensors were used in its flight computer to find out exactly where it was in relation to the planned landing target. Rover then made the necessary adjustments to avoid possible mission-end dangers by adjusting its possible courses.
Drata had to pull the landing on its own because radio signals, moving at 16,000,000 miles per second, needed more than 11 minutes to cross the 1 to 7-million-mile gulf between Earth and Mars. Flight engineers at JPL could just sit and wait, watching the data trickle in 11 minutes after the fact.
And for their relief, after seven months Launch from Cape Canaveral and an interplanetary cruise covering 293 million miles, NASA’s fifth Mars rover, specially designed to detect signs of past life, was safely on the surface of the red planet.
The Jezero Crater was targeted because it once contained a 28-mile-wide body of water the size of a lake. The ancient lake was fed by a river that cut through the edge of the pit, depositing silt in a fan-like delta visible from orbit. The rover swam about 1.2 miles southeast of the delta, near the center of its predicted 1.2.8-by 4..1 mile landing.
“We think we’re facing southeast in terms of shadows, about 140 degrees.” “The bend is flat, it’s about 1.2 degrees. The power system looks good … everything looks great.”
NASA / JPL-Caltech
A robot geologist on Mars
Assuming no major problems develop, the engineers plan to spend about 90 days inspecting Rover’s complex devices and systems.
During the first month, they also plan to deploy and test 4.5 80 million, small 4.5-pounds Helicopter named Chaturya Which will attempt the first powered flight in the thin air of Mars, the “Wright Brothers moment” on another world.
The second experiment will test the possibility of oxygen from the Martian atmosphere, a technology that could one day help future astronauts produce their own air and rocket fuel.
But the primary goal of the mission is to find signs of past biological activity.
Equipped with a robotic arm, a suite of core-sampling drills and state-of-the-art cameras, rock-steam lasers and other equipment, readiness, lake deposits towards the delta, will study adventure and eventually reach the shores of the ancient lake and make promising storage. Samples along the way.
The selected rocks and clays will be placed in a complex internal carousel mechanism that will automatically photograph, analyze and load into a lipstick-sized airtight tube. The rover will then deposit the sealed samples on the surface of Mars, or cache, waiting for the pick-up.
NASA and the European Space Agency plan to send a second rover to Jezero later this decade to collect samples, load them with small rockets and launch them into Mars orbit, where another spacecraft will pull them for a return flight to Earth.
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