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An illustration of your perseverance during your descent to the Martian surface.
POT
When NASA’s Perseverance Mars 2020 rover lands on the surface of the red planet On Thursday he will be wearing a microphone that will hopefully capture the sounds of his descent and landing. But that will not be the only device that will listen to the arrival of Perseverance.
the Mars Insight lander It is located less than 2,000 miles (approximately 3,000 kilometers) from Jezero Crater, where Perseverance will land. Unlike the more charismatic rovers that are designed to roll and explore the Martian landscape, one of Insight’s main jobs is to simply sit in one place and listen to the marsquakes and other seismic activities.
Insight has already been successful in detecting earthquakes, but as the only seismic detection station on the planet, its science team has had trouble identifying the location and magnitude of earthquakes. This is easier to do on Earth, where there is a whole network of seismic sensors that make it easy to calibrate and calculate the details of a certain quake.
Now scientists hope to use the Perseverance landing to get a better picture of the interior structure of Mars and how seismic waves propagate through it. The hope is that Insight can capture different phases of the landing with its sensors. In essence, this will be the first time Insight will “hear” a “tremor” and will also know exactly where it came from. This critical data will allow researchers to refine their models of the Martian interior and calibrate Insight’s seismic sensing powers.
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“Fortunately, the entry, descent and landing of the Perseverance rover is so energetic that it produces signals that are detectable by seismometers,” writes Ben Fernando, a member of the Insight science team, for The Conversation.
Perseverance’s actual landing is meant to be a soft landing that shouldn’t be detectable at long range, but the most energetic parts of the process Fernando is referring to include the spacecraft’s sonic boom as it decelerates during descent, and the impact of two large weights called cruise mass balance devices, also known as CMBDs.
Fernando and his colleagues calculated the signals that could be produced from the sonic boom and found Insight unlikely to detect them. However, the 154-pound (70-kilogram) CMBD will be thrown more than 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) above the surface of Mars and should produce small craters when they hit the planet at high speed.
“This will transmit a large amount of energy to the ground, which will produce seismic waves,” explains Fernando. “We estimate that these signals will be ‘strong’ enough to be detected by InSight’s seismometers about 40% of the time at best. The uncertainties in our estimates are significant, mainly because no one has tried to detect an impact. event at these distances before “.
Regardless of how well it works, even trying to detect a spacecraft landing on Mars with another distant probe will be the first time.
Be sure to stay up to date with all of our coverage of Perseverance’s arrival on Mars, which is scheduled for Thursday at 12:55 PM Pacific Time.
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