A United Launch Alliance Atlas Five rocket with NASA’s nuclear-powered Perseverance Mars rover came to life and took off from planet Earth early Thursday morning, the first step in a decade-long program to look for symptoms beyond microbial life and collect rocks and samples from the floor. for an imaginable return to Earth.
The $2.4 billion rover and cruise level, equipped with solar panels, thrusters, navigation and communications systems, launched on a near-perfect trajectory to Mars about 57 minutes after the takeoff of Cape Canaveral. The vacation will last seven months, putting Perseverance on its way to land on the red planet next February.
The target: a 28-mile-wide crater near the remnants of an ancient river delta amid lakebed deposits where traces of past biological activity might be preserved.
“We’re going to place the most complicated rover on the surface of Mars that ever existed there,” NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a post-launch interview with CBS News. “He’s going to do something never before, he’ll do astrobiology.
“This little rover is going to look for symptoms of ancient life on the red planet. Array… We’re going to do it if we think there’s life there, and then we’re going to cache the samples and in 2026 we’re going to launch a project to Mars to bring the samples home (in 2031).
While pattern collection is the primary target of the Perseverance mission, the rover also carries an experimental $80 million helicopter called Ingenuity for the first powered flight from the planet’s surface. And the rover will check the generation that astronauts can use one day to live off the earth by extracting oxygen from the thin carbon dioxide environment.
“We’re going to fly a helicopter into the world, which has never been done before,” Bridenstine said. “This is a moment in the time of the Wright brothers. And we’re going to turn out that we can turn the Mars carbon dioxide environment into oxygen to sustain life. Because remember, we’re sending humans to Mars. That’s the point.”
Engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory first had communication disorders with Perseverance and his cruising level because the spacecraft was still so close to Earth that its radio transmitter hit sensitive receivers at NASA Deep Space Network listening stations.
When communications were despite all the established, flight controllers discovered that the ship had activated the “safe mode” coverage software after cruise temperatures exceeded the predefined limits while the vehicle was still in the shadow of Earth.
Matt Wallace, deputy director of the Perseverance assignment at JPL, said engineers were running procedures to get the spacecraft back to its general cruise mode and for all of its subsystems to behave in general. Temperature reading is probably the result of too conservative limits built into the flight software and not an indicator of the real problem.
Perseverance is the third Mars probe introduced in the last two weeks, after a spacecraft sent through the United Arab Emirates and China. But NASA’s rover is the most ambitious project for Mars to date, building with good fortune of 8 beyond American landings.
The long-awaited project still began at 07fi0 EDT when the first-stage RD-180 engine built by the Russians from Atlas 5 and 4 forged propulsion belt thrusters was powered, generating a combined thrust of 2.3 million pounds.
The 197-foot-tall rocket and payload tipped the scales at approximately 1.2 million pounds, and excess takeoff force moved farer than usual from Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Base.
In just 35 seconds, the Atlas five traveled faster than sound, and 4 minutes later, when the RD-180 stopped and the first level fell, the vehicle was more than three hundred miles from launch site, about a hundred miles up and down. moving at more than 13,400 mph.
At that time, the hard level of moment driven by Centaur hydrogen took over, proceeding to the ascent to the area with an Aerojet Rocketdyne RL10C-1 engine. Two Centaur shots were required to boost the Perseverance rover and its planetary cruising level at a flight speed from Earth of approximately 26,000 mph.
The rover and the cruise scene, rotated for stability, were launched on an exact trajectory to a point 292 million kilometres from where Mars will be on February 18.
The rover’s descent to the surface, known as “the seven minutes of terror,” will begin when it dives into the Martian environment at more than 12,000 km/h, and its heat shield will withstand temperatures up to 2370 degrees before its rocket propulsion.” heavenly crane.” the spray lowers it to the surface at the end of a bra.
The target landing site, the Jezero crater, includes an ancient river channel that crosses an edge and an obviously visual delta that extends to the back of the crater. The river that flowed three or four billion years ago filled a basin along Lake Tahoe.
“A delta is where you get the deposit of (material) very fine grains, necessarily dust,” said allocation scientist Ken Farley. “Then the dust enters, it is transported along the river, it hits the gentle waters of the lake, and the dust settles.
“The good thing about this is that everything that is transported to the river and that may have been alive, or everything that has lived in the lake, will be buried in this (favorable) environment. Array… Then we know that we have a habitable environment with superior conservation potential.”
Perseverance, designated through a 7th Virginia bookbinder after a national competition, is supplied with a complex pattern collection and packaging system. As the project progresses, a drill at the end of a robotic arm will gather core patterns that will be sealed in small, ultra-clean tubes and deposited in express locations.
The long-range plan calls for a NASA lander to deliver a European Space Agency rover to fetch the samples. The rover will return to the lander, load the samples into a NASA-supplied rocket that will launch a sample container into Mars orbit. A European spacecraft then will capture the container and bring it back to Earth in 2031.
“If it sounds complicated, it is,” said Lori Glaze, director of planetary science at NASA headquarters. “But NASA’s investments in the progression of autonomous robots and the landing of giant payloads on Mars have laid the groundwork for a pattern-of-success recoil campaign.”