But Perseverance, though armed with an array of scientific instruments, is unlikely to spy signs of past life on its own. It would have been a lovely place for any microbial life to evolve, analogous to some lakes on Earth today. Some 3.8 billion years ago, a thicker and warmer martian atmosphere allowed water to flow on the surface: One river penetrated Jezero crater and filled it nearly to the rim. And something else will be listening: NASA's InSight spacecraft, thousands of kilometers away, will use its sensitive seismometer to record the impact of Perseverance's tungsten weights on the surface.Īfter a safe landing, the rover will begin a campaign to drill more than 30 rock and soil samples and cache them in pristine tubes to be picked up by a subsequent mission. Microphones and commercial video cameras attached to the spacecraft should capture, for the first time, the sights and sounds of landing, though that material won't be available for several days. Within minutes, the rover should peer through clear dust covers on its hazard cameras to spy the ground in front and behind it. If the rover lands where engineers want it to, it will find itself staring at a 70-meter cliff of mudstone, the edge of Jezero's fossilized delta. "We have a brand new baby spacecraft in its new environment ready to start rolling around." "And now we're on the surface of Mars," she says. After the rover deploys its six cleated aluminum wheels, explosively powered blades will sever the cords, sending the sky crane to fly and crash a safe distance away, says Erisa Stilley, an EDL engineer at JPL. for those watching from Earth-the sky crane, now falling at only 2.7 kilometers per hour and 20 meters above ground, will lower the rover to the surface, unspooling it with nylon cords. After identifying a safe haven among the crater's cliffs, sand dunes, and boulders, the rover and its sky crane-a sort of rocket-propelled hovercraft-will detach from the parachute.Ī minute later-about 3:55 p.m. The rover will orient itself by comparing what it sees to stored high-resolution maps created by Mars orbiters. Twenty seconds after the parachute deploys, the heat shield will eject, allowing a radar and cameras arrayed on the rover's belly to look for hazards in the terrain below. It's a trivial change in-flight software-one line of code-that engineers expect will make its arrival 10 times more precise than Curiosity's. Whereas Curiosity deployed its parachute once it hit a set speed, Perseverance will wait until it gets within range of the landing site. (Events will be received on Earth on an 11-minute, 22-second radio delay, with NASA streaming a live feed from JPL's control room.) At 3:38 p.m., the heat shield will hit temperatures of 1300☌, hot enough to melt iron. EST, the rover will separate from the cruise stage that ferried it to Mars, dropping tungsten weights to angle its entry into the thin martian atmosphere at hypersonic speeds. "We are headed exactly where we want," says Jennifer Trosper, the mission's deputy project manager at JPL. The landing sequence will mirror that of the Curiosity rover, a near-clone that landed in 2012. On Friday, engineers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) sent a simple command to the rover: "Do EDL." That began the process of entry, descent, and landing, sending the rover, encased in a protective heat shield and backshell, barreling toward the planet. But before the mudstone can be drilled, and before an onboard helicopter can fly, the $2.7 billion rover must first safely land at Jezero crater, which billions of years ago contained a lake and a river delta-auspicious places to look for life. If success comes tomorrow, it will mark the first chapter of an audacious scientific campaign to drill and collect samples- and bring them back to Earth. After 6 months of flight, 8 years of planning, and decades of scientific desire, NASA is set to put the Perseverance rover on the surface of the Red Planet.
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