The procedure began when a 60-ton hoist on the roof of the Space Launch Complex 41’s vertical integration facility lifted the front cone, also known as a payload fairing, at 129 feet (39 meters) above the standby rocket. There, the engineers made the physical and electrical connections that will remain between the propeller and the spacecraft until approximately 50 to 60 minutes after launch, when the two are pyrotechnically separated and Perseverance is on its way.
“I’ve noticed that my equitable percentage of spacecraft is being deployed in rockets,” said John McNamee, assignment manager for the Mars 2020 perseverance rover at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “But this is special because there are many other people who have contributed to this moment. I need to tell them that we have come in combination and that we will get to Mars in the same way.”
Once the mating of the spacecraft and the thruster is complete, the final tests of both (separately and in one unit) will be performed. Then, two days before the July 30 launch, the Atlas V will nevertheless leave the Vertical Integration Facility. As you traverse the train, you will cover the 550 meters of the release platform in approximately 40 minutes. From there, perseverance is approximately seven months and 290 million miles (467 million kilometers) before reaching Mars.
The Launch Period
NASA and the United Launch Alliance recently updated the project’s launch era: the diversity of days the rocket can launch to succeed on Mars. It now runs from July 30 to August 15.
The launch era opened from July 17 to 30 due to delays in processing launchers for spacecraft operations. Four days were also added at the end of the designated launch era on August 11. The NASA and United Launch Alliance flight groups were able to supply the additional days after the last weights of the spacecraft and launcher were obtained, allowing them to do more, as the thruster should be calculated to advance perseverance.
Regardless of the day Perseverance takes off his launch era from July 30 to August 15, he will land at The Jezero Crater of Mars on February 18, 2021. The landing target for an express date and time is helping project planners better perceive lighting and temperature at the landing site, as well as the location of satellites orbiting Mars that are guilty of recording and transmitting the spacecraft’s knowledge of its descent and landing.
Learn about the mission
Managed through the JPL, the perseverance Mars 2020 rover’s astrobiology project will examine the symptoms of ancient microbial life. It will also characterize the climate and geology of the planet, pave the way for human exploration of the red planet and be the first planetary project to gather and store Martian rocks and throats (broken rocks and dust). Subsequent projects, which were recently carried out through NASA in cooperation with the European Space Agency, would send spacecraft to Mars to collect those cached samples on the surface and send them back to Earth for further analysis.