NASA’s Perseverance rover landed on Mars

The “Perseverance” rover has successfully landed on Mars. The US space agency Nasa announced Thursday. The robot was launched from the Cape Canaveral spaceport in July 2020 and is supposed to search for traces of previous microbial life on Mars.

Shortly before 10 p.m., the expected signal arrived from the Red Planet: the United States space agency has made one of the notoriously difficult landings on Mars. The rock samples collected by “Perseverance” should be back on earth by 2031.

The American rover “Perseverance” landed on Mars. After a nearly seven-month flight, the rover landed on the Red Planet on Thursday, the space agency NASA announced. It is supposed to collect rock samples that could reveal whether there was ever life on Mars.

So far, Mars has repeatedly proven to be a death trap for planet Earth’s spacecraft during landings. However, the United States managed to land on Mars for the ninth time since the 1970s with “Perseverance,” its largest and most technically advanced rover to date. A Chinese rover is also expected to land on the Red Planet in May or June.

Anyway, a lot is happening around Mars right now. The Chinese probe has been orbiting the planet since last week, as has one from the United Arab Emirates. All three countries used a favorable time window for their rocket launches in July, as Earth and Mars were only 480 million kilometers apart.

The operations management of the Pasadena Jet Propulsion Laboratory had prepared, as NASA described it, “seven minutes of terror”, during which flight controllers can only watch helplessly to see if the landing goes as scheduled. The “perseverance” entered the Martian atmosphere at a speed of 19,500 kilometers per hour and was then slowed down with a parachute. A rocket-propelled platform, the “Sky Crane”, lowered the six-wheeler to Martian soil, just above the surface. The signal that the landing was successful took eleven and a half minutes to reach the ground.

The rover, nicknamed “Percy,” is the size of a car and runs on plutonium. It is supposed to drill holes with its two-meter-long gripping arm and collect rock samples that may contain traces of previous microscopic life. Three to four dozen samples the size of a piece of chalk should be placed in tubes. Another space probe will collect the samples with its own rover and bring them to Earth by 2031.

For the scientists involved, these are essential questions of humanity. Are we alone in this endless cosmic desert, simply flying through space, or is life much more widespread? Does it appear when and where the right conditions exist? ”Asks Deputy Project Manager Ken Wilford. “Big fundamental questions, and we still don’t know the answers. So we really are before we can answer these huge questions. “

return to homepage