NASA’s Perseverance rover has shown its way and is now on its way to Mars. It will be between 6.5 and 7 months before the rover lands on the red planet in February 2021.
“The mission has 314 million miles of interplanetary space and seven minutes of terror to get safely onto the surface of Mars,” said Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division, in a statement. “When we see the landscape at Jezero Crater for the first time and we truly begin to realize the scientific bounty before us, the fun really begins.”
You can check in on the spacecraft at any time using a real-time tracker provided by NASA’s Eyes on the Solar System app or its solar system interactive.
Here’s what to expect from the rover’s journey, landing and “first steps.”
Perseverance and the Ingenuity helicopter are safely tucked inside a protective aeroshell capsule. The descent stage that will help land the rover is also located in this aeroshell, which is attached to the cruise stage, or the mission’s spacecraft.
The cruise stage is shaped like a disk and solar powered. It will travel more than 300 million miles to reach Mars.
During their cruise to Mars, engineers on Earth will tell the spacecraft when to perform correction maneuvers to keep it on the right path to Mars, as well as its landing target. The floor team will also carry out checks of the spacecraft’s tools and subsystems.
Approximately forty-five days before landing on Mars, the ship will enter the technical phase, with more maneuvers to correct its trajectory.
During what we hope will be a quiet adventure to Mars, perseverance groups will prepare and exercise for the rover’s landing on Mars. The clinical team will prepare the commands you need to send to the rover when using your tools on Mars.
Rover drivers will also paint in a rover style on Earth to prepare perseverance’s adventure across the Martian surface.
That includes a dual Perseverance on Earth to verify the hardware, drive it through the Mars Yard at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and make sure the self-navigation algorithms work, said Heather Justice, head of the downlink of the robot operation and one of the rover pilots at JPL.
The unidirectional soft time required for radio signals from Earth to Mars is approximately 10.5 minutes, meaning that the seven minutes needed to land the spacecraft on Mars will happen without any help or intervention from NASA groups on Earth.
NASA team members call it the “seven minutes of terror.” They tell the spacecraft when to start the EDL (entry, descent and landing), and the spacecraft takes over from there.
The ship reaches the most sensitive environment on Mars by moving at 12,000 miles depending on the time and will have to slow down to 0 miles depending on the hour seven minutes later, when the rover gently lands on the surface.
Approximately 10 minutes before entering the thin Martian atmosphere, the cruising level is deserted and the spacecraft prepares for a guided entrance, where small thrusters in the aeroshell adjust their angle.
The ship’s heat shield will pass at a maximum temperature of 2370 degrees Fahrenheit 75 seconds after entering the atmosphere.
Perseverance aims at an ancient lake bed and a 45-kilometer-wide river delta, the most complicated to date for landing a NASA spacecraft on Mars. Instead of being flat and smooth, the small landing is riddled with sand dunes, steep cliffs, rocks and small craters.
The ship has two updates, called Range Trigger and Terrain-Relative Navigation, to navigate this complicated and harmful site.
Trigger Range will tell the 70.5-foot-wide parachute when deployed depending on the spacecraft’s position 240 seconds after entering the atmosphere. Once the parachute is deployed, the heat shield will detach.
Field navigation acts as a brain at the moment for the rover, using cameras to take pictures of the floor with a quick technique and the safest position to land. You can move the landing point up to 2,000 feet, according to NASA.
The rear hull and parachute separate after the heat shield is released when the spacecraft is 1.3 miles above the Martian surface. Mars landing engines, which come with 8 rockets, will pull to reduce the descent speed from 190 miles depending on the hour to approximately 1.7 miles depending on the time.
Then the remarkable manoeuvre of the heavenly crane that landed the Curiosity rover will occur. Nylon cables will reduce the rover to 25 feet below the descent level. Once the rover has touched the Martian surface, the cables will detach and the descent level will fly and land from a distance.
Once the rover has landed, perseverance’s two-year project will begin and a “verification” era will pass to make sure it’s ready.
The rover will deploy its mast and antenna, create its contact view, perform a “status check” of its instruments, check the movement and “lower” your arm and perform a short check path. Perseverance will also release your belly, which provided a safe haven for the Ingenuity helicopter that was stored there during the cruise and landing.
The rover will also place a large flat surface to drop the Ingenuity helicopter so you can use it as a helipad for its five possible verification flights over a 30-day period. This will happen in the first 50 to 90 soils, or Martian days, of the mission.
Once Ingenuity is installed on the surface, Perseverance will remotely head to a safe location and use its cameras to observe the Ingenuity flight.
After those flights, Perseverance will begin searching for evidence of ancient life, read the climate and geology of Mars, and collect samples that will eventually be returned to Earth on long-term planned missions.
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