Watch as NASA lands its Mars rover on Mars

On February 18, NASA will make a daring attempt to land a car-sized rover on Mars in its most complex mission, in search of life in the ancient outer world. If it survives the sinking of the Red Planet’s atmosphere, the Perseverance Rover will cut the first leg of a grand relay race to capture the first cache of ancient Martian clay specimens of humanity, hoping to get a score on the way, among many other scientific objectives.

When will NASA’s firm rover land on Mars?

The rover, which has traveled 293 million miles since its launch in July last year, is now gearing up to implement the solar system’s most ferocious parking job ever. At approximately 4:48 p.m., Drata will begin its evil seven-minute descent to the surface of Mars, smashing the planet’s atmosphere at a speed of about 12,100 miles per hour, accumulating peacefully in rocks, large boulders, and dangerously sandy jungles. Pit on Mars’ Jezero Crater.

Image: NASA / JPL

In that fully autonomous landing sequence, the diligently carrying spacecraft will withstand the scorching heat, eat up its protective shell, and adjust the mass of the parachute. As it approaches the surface, the spacecraft’s landing phase will fire the ship’s thrusters to slow itself down at a speed of 2 miles per hour and about a few feet above the surface. Then comes the “skycracker” technique: the descent stage, still firing its six mini rocket thrusters, will gently lower the rest of the way to the surface on the cable. Once the rover swims ches down, it will snap its cables, tell the descending stage to take off, eventually landing far away from the diligence.

How to watch the “seven minutes of terror”

To engage engineers virtually in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, as they explore the perimeter dive into Mars, the agency will have live streams of NASA coverage and video and audio of mission control starting at 2:15 ET. Actual footage of the spacecraft landing will take a week to return to Earth, but it will be worth the wait. Perseverance has 19 on-board cameras, and four in its landing gear, promising views of parachute deployment and other steps of its rapid descent.

If the landing choreography goes according to plan, NASA will become the third spacefaring power this month to reach Mars after the United Arab Emirates and China. NASA says some of Rover’s onboard instruments, such as a device that will try to convert Martian carbon dioxide into oxygen oxygen, are being tested to provide information on future astronaut missions to Mars under the agency’s Artemis program.

Stanchi boats landing

Dozens of mission engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California have spent years planning, troubleshooting, mapping and straining a seven-minute landing sequence. “Everything has come down,” NASA’s entry, descent and landing said in an interview with Al Chen. Edge. He calls his team of about 30 engineers working this week “Delivery is the glory of the guys.” But with a 7 7.7 billion rover, the stakes are much higher than your average drone-delivered Amazon package.

“We know that the rest of the mission, the surface mission and every subsequent campaign and the rest of the campaign is up to us. So we want to make sure we don’t let anyone down, “Chen said. Making it more nervous-breaking, the 11-minute delay in communication between Mars and Earth means that one has to diligently run one’s own descent and land all by oneself.

By comparison, it was easier in NASA’s previous Mars rovers. They also endured the infamous “seven-minute terror,” but found an easy landing area. NASA’s Opportunity Rover was greeted by the Martian Eagle Crater’s flat, vast open desert when it landed in 2004. Spirit Rover’s Gusev crater landing site and Curiosity’s site on the Gail crater were equally flat, dotted with only small rocks. A completely different outside world landscape awaits a constant stay on the Jezero Crater, an ancient river delta that bears traces of past life.

“We have this 200-foot rocky wall going straight through the middle,” Chen said. “There are a lot of craters around this place which are full of sand. Even if we land there, it is not safe to get out. And there are rocks in so many different places in so many different places that we definitely don’t want to come down.

What will Drata do on Mars?

Why would NASA choose to land in such a difficult field? That is “because the geology on the Jezero Crater is very well preserved,” said Bruni Horgan, a Purdue University scientist working on the Martian planet. Jezero’s 28-mile-wide diameter can be a goldmine for fossil microorganisms, and its combination of different rock formations provides researchers with a smoggarbard of potential specimens. More than this, scientists believe that Jezero is about a billion. Hosted the river delta billions of years ago, it stored organic matter in long mud after it dried up.

“We think that, based on delta’s orbital data, the mud that may contain organic matter and signs of life is actually preserved at the base of the delta on the rock.”

This is the key to Perseverance’s primary mission: to pack about 43 clay samples in cigar-sized tubes and deposit them at 10 different locations at Jezero. That tube sits on the surface for years until a future “bring” mission jointly planned by NASA and the European Space Agency is carried out. That mission’s turn in relay competition will come in late 2020, when a fleet of four spacecraft and robots will work in the orbit to land on Mars, assemble sample tubes, and re-shoot a soccer ball-sized sample box back into space. Home tour on earth.

The secondary objectives of the diligence include a mini-helicopter called Chaturya. Separated from the rover’s belly, the million 85 million craft will attempt to fly five times in a month’s window into Mars’ ultrathin atmosphere, starting a month or two after Perseverance Land. Using a helicopter blade to pass a planet with an atmosphere thinner than Earth requires extra power and speed for the craft’s four-foot-wide propellers. If the flight demo succeeds as engineers hope, it will mark the first demonstration of a rotorcraft on another world and could unlock un-access to more unstable outer world areas that are rough or slippery for more traditional grounded rovers.

Image: NASA / JPL

The ingenuity, when it weighs half a gallon of milk, will be solar panels for power, its own communications hardware and two cameras (one to record Martian landscapes during a flight and the other to help with navigation). A solid effort is also made with 19 cameras plus some microphones that promise Martian Wind’s high-definition audio dio. For engineers, audio Dio-Visuals provides a tool to monitor the rover’s instruments and ensure everything feels and feels normal. The so-called supercar protruding from the top of the rover – originally looking like the robotic head of Perseverance – will be fixed on the Matian rocks, enclosing them with a laser beam, and analyzing the resulting vapor cloud.

Finding “small parking spaces” on Mars

All those Wild Science and Engineering are surviving on a successful landing on Thursday.

For its landing area, Pers Pers has a cushion of 4.8 miles. For a mission millions of miles to Mars, the 8.8 mile is a small bull, 10 times smaller than the Curiosity rover, which landed in 2012, and 300 times smaller than NASA’s first Mars rover, the Sojourner, in 1997. This type of tactical precision is made possible by two pieces of technology that other rovers did not have: a “range trigger” that will precisely pull Perseverance’s parachute out when it drops to 940mph during its descent, and an expanded navigation system that Creates a link to calculate where the rover will land in Jezero with Mars orbit.

“The way these people used to get in the car, look out the car window and see what you see and then try to find out where you are by looking at your map,” Chen said. “We don’t need the whole thing anymore [landing zone] In order for the runway to be flat and a boring parking lot, we need small parking lots that have intersections that we can reach. “