NASA’s latest robotic explorer will arrive on Mars on Thursday afternoon after visitors from the United Arab Emirates and China, the third spacecraft to reach the planet this month. The Perseverance rover Jezero is heading towards the crater, which planetary scientists believe could be the ideal place to find preserved signs of life many billions of years ago, if life ever arose on Mars.
But first, NASA’s mission has to come down to one piece.
When is the landing and how can I follow it?
The touchdown is expected to be at 3:55 p.m. Eastern time. NASA television will begin broadcasting from the mission’s controlroom at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California at 2:15 p.m.
During the descent, the spacecraft will send updates on how it is doing. Because its main antenna will not point to Earth, its direct message will only be a range of simple tones.
“We can use that tone to tell us different things, like the heat shield is off or something like that,” Alan Chen, chief engineer for the mission’s landing portion, told a news conference Wednesday.
It is possible that Drata will send back some photographs from the surface via NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, but it may take hours for them to get there. “It’s golden if we get it,” said Jennifer Trusper, the mission’s deputy project manager.
Why is it difficult to land on Mars?
In short, for the period from the rover’s entry into the atmosphere to its landing, NASA will have to continuously reduce to more than 12,000 miles per hour, while NASA calls it a “seven-minute terror.” D – There is no chance of over. The path of light will intersect with the surface of Mars. The only question is whether the rover will end up in one piece, ready to begin its mission, or cut into several pieces.
The thin atmosphere of Mars increases the difficulty of many levels. The spacecraft needs a heat shield, as friction from the air molecules heats its underside by thousands of degrees. But just for a light landing with a parachute there is not enough friction to slow it down.
What will happen during the landing attempt?
The spacecraft will have to handle the landing operation manually. It takes 11 minutes for a radio signal to travel from Mars to Earth. This means that if anything went wrong, it would be too late for the people at NASA’s Mission Operations Center to get the word out.
“It’s all going to happen autonomously,” said Matt Valace, deputy project manager. “It simply came to our notice then. It’s something the spacecraft can control. ”
About 80 seconds after entering the atmosphere, the spacecraft experiences camp temperatures, with the ield of heat at the bottom of the capsule reaching 2,370 degrees Fahrenheit. At room temperature – inside the capsule, it is much less toasting. As the air decreases, the spacecraft continues to slow down.
Small thrusters at the top of the capsule fire tweak the angle and direction of its descent and continue it towards its landing site.
Four minutes after entering the atmosphere, at an altitude of about seven miles, the capsule is traveling at a speed of 1,000 miles per hour. It then deploys a giant parachute, more than 70 feet in diameter.
The spacecraft now leaves the heat shield, allowing cameras and other devices to take note of the terrain below to determine its position.
Despite the huge parachute, the spacecraft is descending at a speed of about 200 miles per hour.
The next crucial step is called the Sky Crane maneuver. The top of the capsule, called the backshell, lets go and is carried away by a parachute. Two pieces of spacecraft remain. The top is the landing stage – in essence the rocket-powered jetpack carries the rover beneath it. First stage steering fire engine to avoid collision with backshell and parachute. Engines then slow down to less than two miles per hour.
About 66 feet above the surface, the rover then descends on the cables. The lower phase continues downwards until the rover’s wheels hit the ground. The cables are then cut, and the rover lands at a safe distance to fly down to crash.
What are the chances that this will work?
It has already worked once. The Curiosity rover, currently on Mars, used the same landing system successfully in 2012. But spacecraft are complex systems, and one success does not guarantee another success.
The diligence has a stronger parachute and a more precise navigation system. NASA engineers say they have tried every step to improve the likelihood that everything will work out, but they don’t know if they’ve detected any contingencies.
“We’ve never come up with a really good way to calculate the probability of success,” said Mr. Vlace Les, deputy project manager.
For decades, NASA has been successful in eight of the nine landing attempts on Mars. The only failure was the Mars Polar Lander in 1999.
“I’m terrified,” executive NASA administrator Steve Jursick admitted in an interview.
What will the rover do on Mars?
Over the last 20 years, NASA has gradually asked more complex questions about Mars. First, the mantra was “follow the water,” that’s how life was there. With signs of vast valleys, winding rivers and dried up lakes, it has become clear that in the past, water is flowing on Mars even though the planet is cold and dry today.
The target of Drata is Jezero Crater. The rover will explore the delta of a river that once flowed into a lake that filled a pit. Silt. The throat is a promising site where the fossilized chemical signatures of ancient Matian microbes are still preserved today.
The rover is largely the same design as the Curiosity rover, which is now studying Gail Crater. But it is housed in a separate set of equipment, including sophisticated cameras, lasers that can analyze the chemical makeup of rocks and ground-passing radar. Tests of these instruments on Earth showed the possibility of finding preserved signs of past life.
What about that “Marscopter”?
NASA’s new rover has a four-pound helicopter called Ingenuity that will try to do something that has never happened before: the first controlled flight to another world in our solar system.
Flying to Mars is not a trivial endeavor. There is not much air to force the lift to generate. On the surface of Mars, the atmosphere is as ga ense as Earth. Low gravity – a third of what you experience here – helps get airborne. But taking off from the surface of Mars is like flying through the thinnest air that can be found at an itude altitude of 100,000 feet above the Earth. No terrestrial helicopter has ever flown so high on its own, and more than twice the normal altitude.
To overcome these challenges, NASA engineers used a series of materials and computer technological advances. About two months after landing, Perseverance will land the helicopter out of its belly, and the ingenuity will attempt a series of about five test flights of increasing duration.
If the tests are successful, it could pave the way for future, larger Marscopters. The choice of robotic flyers, similar to the transition from stationary landers to rovers in previous decades, could increase the space agency’s ability to study the Martian landscape in more detail.
