How will the rover land?
Entry, descent and landing (EDL) will begin when the spacecraft carrying Perseverance
“This is one of the most difficult maneuvers. Almost 50% of the spacecraft that have been sent to the surface of Mars have failed, ”explains Matt Wallace, deputy mission project manager.
Entering the atmosphere
Ten minutes before entering the Martian atmospherethe spacecraft drops the cruise stage that supplied fuel tanks and solar panels during travel. He will only have a protective aerosol shell carrying the rover and the descent stage. He will start the engines to make sure his heat shield is facing forward.
At an altitude of about 130 kilometers, he will rush intoatmosphere, and everything will start to heat up: Peak heating will occur in about 80 seconds, when the surface of the heat shield reaches about 1300 degrees Celsius.
Parachute deployment
Once the spacecraft slows to less than 1,600 kilometers per hour, it’s time to deploy a 21.5-meter-wide supersonic parachute at an altitude of 11 kilometers.
By the way, Perseverance has introduced a new technologyRange Trigger. It determines the exact moment to deploy depending on the position of the ship relative to the landing site. It is the opening of the parachute that poses a great risk.
To test the new design, NASA had to conduct extensive testing of supersonic parachutes from high altitude here on Earth. This area of research has not been explored since the 1970s.
Splitting the heat shield
Then the spacecraft will drop the heat shieldapproximately 20 seconds after the deployment of the parachute. The rover will enter the atmosphere for the first time and use the landing radar to reflect signals off the surface and calculate the exact altitude.
The mission will also deploy another one for the first time.technology: Relative Terrain Navigation (TRN), which uses a special camera to determine the characteristics of the surface and compare them with an onboard map on which engineers have pre-programmed the safest landing sites.
This gives the rover vision and the ability to actually see where it is going and determine where its location is.
In the thin atmosphere of Mars, a parachute canonly accelerate the device to 300 kilometers per hour, so Perseverance needs to release the parachute, abandon its rear shell and use rocket motors to facilitate the descent.
He will do it with an eight-motora jetpack, which is mounted directly above the rover and will launch at an altitude of about 2100 meters above the surface. The vehicle must immediately tilt to avoid dropping the parachute and the rear of the hull and then use its sophisticated systems to continue its descent.
Skycrane
12 seconds before the flight at an altitude of 20 meters, the rocket-powered descent stage lowers the rover to the ground using long cables in a skycrane maneuver.
The rover locks its legs and wheels in the landingposition and touching the ground at a speed of just under two miles (1.2 kilometers) per hour when the descent stage flies off and makes a controlled landing. Perseverance is now ready to take on its mission as Earth's fifth rover on Mars.
What is known about the rover?
Landing of the six-wheeled ship will be the thirda visit to Mars in just over a week. Not so long ago, two spacecraft from the United Arab Emirates and China entered orbit around the planet one after the other. All three missions launched in July to take advantage of the close proximity of Earth and Mars, covering about 482 million miles in nearly seven months.
"Perseverance", the largest and most advancedthe rover ever sent by NASA will be the ninth spacecraft to successfully land on Mars, all from the US since the 1970s.
A rover the size of a car with plutoniumthe engine will target NASA's smallest and most difficult target: an 8 by 6 km strip in an ancient river delta full of holes, rocks and fields of stones. Scientists believe that if life on Mars ever flourished, it would have happened 3-4 billion years ago, when the planet still had water.
NASA described the fall of Perseverance as “seven minuteshorror ", which air traffic controllers can only watch helplessly. The pre-programmed spacecraft is designed to enter the thin Martian atmosphere at 9,500 km / h, then use a parachute to slow down.
Mars is actually a very tricky place:In less than three months in 1999, an American spacecraft was destroyed in orbit due to engineers confusing metric and English units, and an American lander crashed on Mars due to premature engine shutdowns.
NASA is teaming up with the European Space Agency to bring samples from Mars to Earth.
The main task of Perseverance
Seven months in space, a mission that took decades to build and cost billions of dollars, — everything to answer the question: was there ever life on Mars?
NASA's Perseverance rover prepares forlanding on the Red Planet to find clear signs of bacteria that may have existed there billions of years ago, when conditions were warmer and wetter than today. Over the next few years, the rover will try to collect 30 rock and soil samples in sealed tubes, which will eventually be sent to Earth sometime in the 2030s for laboratory analysis.
“Of course, he is trying to achieve significantprogress in answering one of the questions that has been asked us for many centuries, namely: are we alone in the universe? " This was announced on Wednesday by NASA Deputy Administrator Thomas Zurbuchen.
Perseverance is the largest and most complex craft ever sent to Mars.
It is about the size of an SUV, weighs a ton, has a two-meter robotic arm, 19 cameras, two microphones and a suite of advanced scientific instruments.
The dream of astrobiologists
Scientists believe that about 3.5 billion years ago, a river flowed in the crater, which flowed into the lake, depositing sediment in a fan-shaped delta.
"We have very strong evidence that Mars could have supported life in the distant past," Ken Williford, the mission's deputy scientist, said Wednesday.
But if past research has determined that the planet was once habitable, Perseverance is tasked with determining if it was indeed inhabited.
In the summer, he would begin drilling the first samples, and his engineers planned for him to cross first the delta, then the shore of the ancient lake, and finally the rim of the crater.
Perseverance maximum speed - 0.1 km per hour- slow by Earth standards, but faster than any of its predecessors, and along the way, it will use new tools to scan organic matter, map chemical composition and blast rocks with a laser to study steam. ...
“We astrobiologists have dreamed of this mission for decades,” concluded Mary Wojtek, head of NASA's astrobiology program.
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