- NASA is preparing to launch its Perseverance rover, a car-sized nuclear powered robot, to Mars on July 30.
- After reaching Mars, the rover will make a heartbreaking descent to the surface that will require a heat shield, supersonic parachute, and a rocket-powered crane.
- NASA hopes to record much of the descent and landing with six high-definition cameras, possibly returning the first video of a spacecraft landing on another planet.
- Perseverance is also packing an experimental helicopter, called Ingenio, microphones and high-tech instruments to look for signs of past extraterrestrial lives.
- Visit the Business Insider home page for more stories.
One out of every two spacecraft that humanity shoots toward Mars to land never succeeds.
Those are the tough odds facing NASA’s upcoming Mars 2020 mission and the Perseverance rover, which is currently slated to launch from Earth on July 30 and hit the red planet on February 18.
The cost of the $ 2.4 billion mission, eight years of development, and the work of thousands of people will come down to a recurring nightmare for aerospace engineers called the “Seven Minutes of Terror” – the entry, descent, and landing phase that every spacecraft on Mars must survive. to explore the surface of the world.
“We have literally seven minutes to get from the top of the atmosphere to the surface of Mars, going from 13,000 mph to zero in perfect sequence, perfect choreography, perfect timing,” said Adam Steltzner, chief engineer for the Perseverance mission. in a 2012 video from NASA-JPL about its predecessor robot, the Curiosity rover (which is still getting stronger). “The computer has to do it all by itself without help from the ground. If something doesn’t work out, the game is over.”
Like the previous Mars missions, Curiosity took some stills of part of their descent, though no interplanetary spacecraft have recorded video of their landing phase, let alone in high definition.
With Perseverance, however, the team behind the car-sized nuclear robot hopes to change that.
“We have something new this time: We have taken some tough commercial cameras and spread them around the spacecraft,” Matt Wallace, deputy project manager for the Mars mission, said during a press conference on June 17. “Those cameras will take high-definition video of the spacecraft during entry, descent, and landing activity. So we should be able to see this large parachute inflate supersonally, we should be able to see the rover deployed and land on the surface . “
He added: “This is going to be very exciting; it is the first time that we have seen a spacecraft land on another planet.”
Standard cameras for a $ 2.4 billion mobile
An artist’s concept represents NASA’s Perseverance (or Mars 2020) rover exploring the surface of the red planet.
NASA / JPL-Caltech
The entry, descent and landing chamber or “EDLCAM” system in Perseverance is what NASA calls a “discretionary payload.”
The project is effectively an additional addition to the robot’s main instrument suite. Those main tools include a Martian climate monitoring station, a 3D camera, organic compound detectors, a rotary hammer drill, and even a device to store the first samples of Martian soil (to return to Earth on a future mission).
The engineers decided on EDLCAM when they realized they had the space and power to add them without hindering the mission’s overall goal: digging into Martian earth for signatures of past microbial alien lives.
“They take up very, very little mass and volume,” Wallace told Business Insider during the briefing. “They are essentially imperceptible at the spacecraft level.”
However, mission managers did not build custom EDLCAM hardware – they ordered some.
The equipment purchased included five 1.3-megapixel USB cameras and one 3.1-megapixel Point Gray camera (now owned by FLIR), Universe Kogaku lenses, a 480-gigabyte solid-state drive, and a small computer running Linux, according to Andrew Good, NASA / JPL-Caltech spokesperson.
Good pointed out that the cameras are not designed to fly through the vacuum of space or descend through the atmosphere of another planet. However, the entire spacecraft and its components underwent a final overhaul that relied on vibration, vacuum chamber, and thermal exposure tests before it got into a 15-foot-wide hull and landed on top of a rocket.
“Assuming they work as they should, we will have an amazing video of Mars, but we will have to see how they work,” Good said of the cameras in an email to Business Insider.
An unprecedented recording of a dazzling landing on Mars
The heat shield (left) and back shell (right) that comprise the aeroshell for NASA’s Perseverance (or Mars 2020 rover) mission.
Lockheed Martin Space via NASA / JPL-Caltech
After Perseverance launches and completes your roughly 200-day cruise to Mars, the dreaded seven minutes of terror will begin, formally known as the mission’s entry, descent, and landing phase.
Approximately 17 minutes before landing, the Perseverance two-piece protective cover (the top or rear deck contains a parachute and the bottom is a heat shield) will disconnect from a rocket-powered cruise stage.
Ten minutes later, the shaped capsule will begin to break through and slow down in the Martian atmosphere, which is about 1% thicker than Earth’s. However, braking a spacecraft traveling at 13,000 mph generates incredible temperatures ahead of the heat shield that can reach 3,800 degrees Fahrenheit.
After the capsule has bled most of its speed, and when it is approximately 7 miles from the Martian surface, a parachute will fly out from the top of the capsule and further reduce it to approximately 1,200 mph. Just before this point, Good said, three parachute cameras will begin filming, part of the six cameras in the EDLCAM system.
Five miles from the ground, the heat shield will drop from the capsule, exposing a mobile observation camera, which will begin recording.
An animation of photos showing the deployment of the Mars Curiosity rover’s heat shield during its descent and landing phase on August 6, 2012.
NASA / JPL-Caltech; Malin Space Science Systems (via Spaceflight101)
Eighty seconds later, the rover, connected to a rocket-powered descent stage called “SkyCrane,” will disengage from its rear shell. Just before that, a camera looking down at the SkyCrane will start recording, just like a camera looking up at the rover.
A radar system will tell SkyCrane exactly when to start firing its rocket engines, aiming to slow down perseverance enough to hang it, like a robotic puppet doll, from a series of cables. Once the rover contacts the surface, the cables will come loose, the SkyCrane will fly away, and Perseverance will begin its one-year mission.
“When people look at it, it seems crazy. That’s a very natural thing. Sometimes when we look at it, it seems crazy,” Steltzner said in the 2012 video on Curiosity, which demonstrated that the system works. “It is the result of reasoned engineering thinking. But it still seems crazy.”
Transmitting images to Earth can take several weeks
The solid state drive in the mobile will record images from the HD camera while each device is connected. NASA expects to record about 25,000 images in total, and at frame rates ranging from 12 to 75 images per second. (Standard cell phone footage ranges from 30 to 60 fps.)
“The images will be compressed and returned as video files back to the mobile, in a video format similar to that of a typical cell phone,” Good said.
After piling up the gigabyte value into unprecedented images, NASA doesn’t expect to see it on Earth very quickly. “We will bring those images back in the first two weeks on the surface,” Wallace said.
Only the cameras above and below the rover will remain connected after landing. However, NASA does not expect to use those cameras, or that they will survive on the red planet.
“[T]”Hey, they weren’t designed to survive the extreme harsh Martian surface temperatures and therefore may not last long on the surface mission,” Good added.
This artist’s concept shows the Ingenuity helicopter on the Martian surface.
NASA / JPL-Caltech
Perseverance is also packing an experimental helicopter, called Ingenio, which it will drop in hopes of trying the first air flights on Mars.
The rover will also house two microphones, which engineers will turn on once the robot lands safely. If the devices work, NASA could record the first bona fide audio from Mars, including gusts of wind, rover wheels on the ground and rocks, drilling sounds, and more.
As Nancy Atkinson wrote for The Planetary Society, previous Mars missions brought microphones with them as well, but what a planetary scientist told Atkinson was a “major disappointment,” they either failed or were never activated.
