NASA’s launch of the Perseverance Mars rover last week marked an exciting new moment in exploration, building in more than two decades on the Red Planet.
NASA landed its first rover, Sojourner, on the Martian surface on July 4, 1997. The length of a remote-controlled car, traveled a hundred meters in 3 months, analyzing rocks and taking photos. Seven years later, in January 2004, Spirit and Opportunity, dual rovers that landed a few weeks apart, were put to work. Two years later, Spirit got stuck and eventually lost his power. NASA will resign in 2011. But Opportunity continued on his way, eventually covering 28 miles of Martian land before succumbing to a dust typhoon in May 2018. By then, Curiosity had landed, the largest and most unpleasant Martian rover.
Curiosity is approximately the length of an SUV. It’s so gigantic that, in fact, it may not have the same focus of falling and bouncing from the rovers of the past. Instead, NASA had to expand a new formula known as the celestial crane, which used rockets to prevent Curiosity’s descent before gently reducing it to the planet’s surface.
Curiosity will celebrate its eighth anniversary on the Red Planet on August 5, 2020, but may not be celebrating a satisfied birthday as it did in 2013. Unfortunately, this was a unique event. However, if there has ever been a time to celebrate, it is now. Soon, Curiosity will have a new partner in Perseverance, NASA’s new Mars rover.
Perseverance was introduced from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 0740 EDT on July 30, 2020, aboard the ULA Atlas V rocket. His project, continue the paintings initiated through his predecessors. Each of the previous explorers has uncovered evidence suggesting the choice of an ancient life on Mars, or at least life-friendly situations. Perseverance will embark on an astrobiology project in search of symptoms of ancient microbial life on Mars, especially in Jezero crater. But the perseverance project has just begun and the road to Mars is long.
Traveling approximately 25,000 miles in a consistent manner with the time, Perseverance has already set more than a million miles. Even at those impressive speeds, the ship will take more than six and a half months to make the journey. Perseverance is expected to land on February 18, 2021.
For now, the ship, safely kept in its aeroshell capsule, is in coastal mode. In the coming months, it will cross interplanetary space, making occasional course corrections. Planets are moving targets, constantly traveling along their orbits. Hitting others, as Scotty said so eloquently in Star Trek in 2009, is like hitting a ball with a smaller ball, dressing up blindfolded and riding. It may not be that difficult, but it requires precision. Course corrections are necessary to ensure that perseverance not only travels to Mars, as planned, but also reaches the intended destination. His project is based not only on reaching the red planet safely, but also on his arrival at the Jezero crater.
The team, back on Earth, will also use this time for tools and systems, and will exercise to maneuver the rover, with a duplicate linked to Earth.
When perseverance reaches Mars, it will go through the maximum and difficult component of the mission: landing. This first step in this procedure comes to enter the environment at approximately 13,000 miles in a manner consistent with the time. That’s when the aeroshell will come out on its own.
Entering the environment at those speeds, even in an environment like Mars, raises the temperature to thousands of degrees. The contact process, from the access point to the environment to the surface contact point, takes approximately seven minutes.
This is called the seven minutes of terror.
These moments are so called because all this time, the in-house team can do nothing to interfere in case of challenges. And, because of the delay in the sign, they wouldn’t even know of a fatal challenge until it’s too past because of doing something. When the first sign reaches Earth, indicating the spacecraft’s access to the atmosphere, it has already crashed or landed safely.
Instead, scientists and engineers rely on exact drawings and engineering to complete the contact sequence. Fortunately, Perseverance will use the same procedure that worked so effectively to deliver Curiosity. So we have a concept of how it will work. That’s what it looks like.
The aeroshell, with Perseverance inside, will hit the environment. The Martian environment is about a hundred times thinner than Earth’s, which is thick enough to cause a problem, but not thick enough to provide much help in decelening the ship. The heat shield will take heat somewhere in the diversity of 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit (1,300 degrees Celsius). Most of this heat will be removed from the ship. If all goes well, perseverance will delight in little more than a hot summer’s day.
Atmospheric friction will slow the ship to about 540 miles depending on the time, fast enough to leave a $2.7 billion crater on Mars.
Approximately seven miles above the surface, a 70.5-foot-diameter parachute will be deployed, designed to slow perseverance’s descent. The parachute will face up to tens of thousands of pounds of strength and something like nine Gs. At this point, the heat shield is no longer needed and will be released. The most important thing is that it blocks the radar on the ground, which is essential for the next level of landing.
Once the heat shield is out of range, the new terrain navigation formula comes into play. Measures perseverance’s position relative to the Martian surface in real time, reducing the margin of error from several kilometers to several hundred feet. This allows the rover to land in places that past missions would have dared, such as Jezero Crater.
Even with the parachute deployed, the ship still travels two hundred miles consistently in hours to the surface. It has slowed significantly since its initial speed of 13,000 miles consistent with the hour, but is still moving too fast to land safely. The parachute, having done his best, was indifferent and the ship went in free fall. That’s when the descent level begins.
A network of 8 rocket engines, pointing towards the planet’s surface, lights up. But the parachute is above the ship, falling to the ground, so before doing anything else, those rockets will have to perform a quick maneuver, moving the ship on a new trajectory, away from the parachute. Once in its new location, the radar formula examines the contact site and makes the last course corrections before the descent level stops the ship’s momentum.
To avoid lifting too much dust, this level does not land on the surface. Instead, it stops about 20 feet above the ground and lowers the rover to the surface in what is called the ‘air crane maneuver’. With the rover still firmly on the ground, the cable is cut off and the descent level flies at a safe distance before the collision landing.
All this happens in seven minutes. All this happens without any outdoor influence from the floor equipment. It’s a testament to engineering, years of painting and hope.
After traveling millions of miles and enduring those tense moments at the end, Perseverance will, despite everything, be able to get to work. First, a prestige check.
Perseverance will go through a series of systems checks to ensure there was no damage sustained during the trip. It will take a short test drive and find a place for Ingenuity, a small helicopter stowed in its belly, to set up shop.
The ingenuity deserves to complete the first motor flight in another world. Perseverance’s selected location will serve as an airstrip for five flights, infrequently the first 90 days of the mission. These flights will be observed through some of the 23 cameras on board Perseverance.
The ingenuity has no clinical tools of its own and will conduct more experiments. This is a technological demonstration, necessarily evidence of concept to see if a controlled flight is feasible on Mars.
While controlled flight is a proven generation on Earth, the Martian environment poses several major challenges. Its environment is much thinner than we are used to here at home, which means there is less air to reach the elevator. To succeed on this, Ingenuity was built light, only about 4 pounds, and its rotor blades rotate at 2400 rpm. Nor can it be directly controlled, due to the retention in the sign between Earth and Mars. Instructions will be sent in advance and the ship will have some diversity during the flight.
If successful, Ingenuity will lay the groundwork for future long-term projects on Mars, opening up an air dynamic that is not available lately. Using the lessons learned from this project can allow flying probes to perform surveys, deliver high-definition aerial images, and succeed in places not available to the scout vehicle.
Once Ingenuity’s flights are over, Perseverance will move on to its main mission: to seek direct past life on Mars.
While Mars’ previous probes have provided evidence of the possible habitability of the red planet, Perseverance is the first spacecraft supplied to deal with the factor once and for all.
The Jezero crater, once a river delta billions of years ago. Previous studies indicate that the crater is surrounded by carbonate deposits. Similar deposits on Earth are related to fossilized shells and corals.
Given the water beyond the Jezero crater and the deposits there, the hope is that perseverance can be a fossil record of ancient life.
Perseverance has a variety of tools specially designed to read about the chemical composition of Martian geology. Your SuperCam is capable of chemical research and mineralogy. The planetary tool for X-ray lithochemistry (PIXL) maps the elemental composition of surface materials. SHERLOC (they went crazy with tool names) means Scan habitable environments with Raman – Luminscence for Organics and Chemicals. It uses a spectrometer and a UV laser to identify biological compounds.
These teams will help Perseverance locate suitable sites and locations for core sample collection. These samples will be stored in steel tubes for an imaginable recovery and additional study.
The plan is for a long-term mission, recently scheduled for 2026, to go to the recovery site with a recovery robot, collect the stored samples, and place them on a rocket that will bring them back to Earth. Hopefully, it will pass to be back on Earth in 2031.
In addition to Perseverance’s biological mission, he will also carry out some other technological demonstration, delighting oxygen resources in situ on Mars. MOXIE will produce oxygen from atmospheric carbon dioxide. The good fortune of this experiment would provide a useful tool for long-term manned missions on Mars.
If successful, this generation would allow long-term astronauts to remove oxygen from the Martian air to use as fuel and to breathe.
Perseverance will carry out its project for a Martian year, about two years on Earth. However, if previous rovers are an indication, this new addition to the Martian population will be their planned project and will continue to provide valuable data in the coming years. Their goals are ambitious and can reposition the world. Perseverance will pave the way for long-term exploration of the solar system, whether in equipment and robotics, and expand our wisdom from our position in the cosmos. Even at zero-G, it’s a lot of weight to carry.
With the combined efforts of thousands of engineers and scientists, and a little luck, we’ll make it. Good trip, perseverance. We’re you.
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