Touchdown confirmed! After almost seven months of interplanetary travel and an excruciating seven minute descent, NASA’s Perseverance rover (a.k.a Percy) made safe contact with Mars’s rocky surface on the afternoon of February 18. Following the separation from its cruise stage and entering the atmosphere at the supersonic speed of about 20,100 kilometers per hour, Perseverance worked its way down to Jezero Crater, lying just north of the Martian equator and about 3,700 kilometers from the landing site of its sibling rover Curiosity.
Newly released video footage and images from the spacecraft’s onboard cameras shows its calculated maneuvers and split stage descent. At an altitude of about 12 kilometers from the Martian surface, the rover’s back shell deployed its 70.5-foot-wide parachute. Seconds later the craft’s heat shield detached and plummeted below. Percy proceeded to radar lock 7.4 kilometers from the ground and switched to its hazard avoidance autopilot system called Terrain Relative Navigation (TRN) to find the best-suited place for landing.
The thin Martian atmosphere would have proven another problem for the rapidly descending vehicle if it were not for its final stage known as the sky crane maneuver. After a back shell separation, the rocket-powered jet pack attached to Percy assisted in its deceleration and diversion to its intended location. Thereafter, the rover was lowered by three cables and softly landed its six wheels on Martian soil.
Bearing in mind the 11-minute signal travel delay from Mars to Earth, each painstaking moment of this seemingly impossible feat was broadcasted “live” to us and the engineers and scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California.
“So much has been riding on this,” stated JPL’s Chief Engineer and landing veteran Rob Manning. “This is a sign. NASA works. And when we put our arms together, and our hands together, and our brains together, we can succeed. This is what NASA does and this is what we can do as a country.”
So what does the future hold next for Perseverance? JPL director Mike Watkins describes this accomplishment as “the first step in Mars sample return.” Through the radioactive decay of plutonium, the rover’s generator converts the decay heat to electricity, powering the vehicle for its next two years on Mars. It will begin the exploration of Jezero’s geologically diverse landscape, seeking signs of ancient life by gathering rocks and soil samples that could one day be returned to Earth for testing.
“A lot of the effort to develop the rover was specifically designed for that sampling and caching system. It’s one of the most complex robotic systems ever made,” says Watkins in an after-landing celebration interview. “It is just fantastic to be able to do that and to learn from each rover, learn from the science and engineering and make the next one better, and make more and more discoveries… Each one more exciting than the last.”
Several other scientific instruments have also been built into the vehicle for the purpose of acquiring new information about the rover’s surrounding environment. The Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE), will be used to demonstrate a way to produce oxygen out of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for future human exploration. PIXL, an x-ray fluorescence spectrometer and imager will perform detailed detection and analysis of the elemental composition of the Martian surface. PIXL’s counterpart SHERLOC alternatively uses an ultraviolet laser for mapping and includes a high-resolution color camera for microscopy imaging.
NASA has even stated its intent to perform the first powered flight test on Mars using the four-pound helicopter, Ingenuity, which hitched a ride with Perseverance all the way to the barren planet. In an interview for Stevens News, Assistant Professor Jason Rabinovitch, of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, discussed his previous contributions to the helicopter’s design and his position as an Entry, Descent, and Landing (EDL) engineer at JPL.
“The project is a technology demonstration, so it was able to accept a higher level of risk than normal, even though it is not contributing to the primary science goals of the mission,” says Rabinovitch. “Flying on Mars is hard! The atmosphere is so thin that even though gravity on Mars is only one-third the gravity on Earth, powered flight is extremely challenging to achieve. A lot of effort was put into developing Ingenuity, and I’m excited to hopefully see it try to fly on Mars in the next few months!”
At this moment, Perseverance continues to operate healthily eight sols, or Martian days, into its mission. NASA has continued to keep the public up-to-date with landing information and highlights, posting imagery along with the very first audio recordings for us to hear on Earth from Mars. Past the humming of the rover is the sound of restless winds, and all at once, the existence of a desolate planet millions of miles away begins to feel remarkably close to home.
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