The latest from Mars!
After seven months of travel, Perseverance made a spectacular landing on Mars yesterday. On a mission to gather evidence of ancient life on the red planet, Perseverance was launched at the Jezero Crater, once the site of a lake where Martian microbes are thought to have existed. Perseverance is the fifth, and most complex, rover that NASA has sent to Mars.
The landing marked a huge triumph for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Besides the technical challenges involved in sending a spacecraft about 230 million miles from one planet to the next, COVID constraints meant the highly collaborative, eight-year project, involving thousands of people, had to be completed at arm’s-length. As the mission now turns to preparations for on-planet activities, it’s worth noting a few of the cool features of the big landing event.
Hitting the mark
Even the Russian judges had to agree that Perseverance nailed the landing in Jezero Crater. Hitting its spot in the 28-mile wide dry lakebed is like programming and propelling a dart to launch from Washington, DC, and hit a bull’s-eye in Dallas. Mars landings have a historical success rate of about 50 percent, and this one added to the hits with a gold star.
And Perseverance makes 3
NASA now has three vehicles roaming the surface of Mars: Curiosity, InSight, and now Perseverance. Curiosity has been there almost nine years and Insight about three. Equipped with supersensitive seismic detection instruments, InSight was primed to be listening for tremors on the surface of Mars resulting from Perseverance’s landing. InSight detecting Perseverance’s landing would mark the first time one spacecraft has “heard” another on the same planet.
Swati Mohan sits at her desk in Mission Control monitoring the progress of Perseverance on its descent towards the surface of Mars.
Swati’s star turn
The voice that guided viewers through the drama of Perseverance landing belonged to Swati Mohan, an Indian-American engineer who came to the U.S. when she was one year old. Educated at Cornell and MIT, she has worked on spaceflight missions at JPL for more than 15 years. Watching Star Trek as a kid and taking her first physics class at age 16 launched her towards a career in space exploration. As she calmly and expertly narrated the landing, Mohan’s profile started buzzing on social media, identifying her as a role model and inspiration for girls around the world.
Built tough
Perseverance is an incredibly built piece of rocketcraft. It executed an automated landing sequence that involved deceleration from over 12,000 MPH to about 2 MPH, or quick walking speed, in less than 10 minutes. Temperatures on the bottom of the spacecraft reached about 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit, owing to friction generated from entering Mars’s atmosphere. Now it will become a Martian dune buggy/scientific Swiss Army Knife, beetling its way around the rocky terrain of Mars and carrying out path-breaking explorations and experiments for years to come.
A rendering of Ingenuity on the surface of Mars, readying for take-off.
Along for the ride
Perseverance brought a helicopter along with it, called Ingenuity. If it succeeds in flying on Mars, Ingenuity would mark the first instances of controlled flight on another planet. Built extra-light to make lift-off possible in an atmosphere 99 percent thinner than Earth’s, Ingenuity has two pairs of carbon fiber rotors made to spin up to 2,400 times per minute. Helicopters typically spin their blades at about 500 RPM’s. The mission calls for Ingenuity to make five flights, each one more ambitious than the last.
Follow Perseverance’s travels from home
Anyone can track the movements of Perseverance on the surface of Mars, as it goes about its business. This online map will be updated every day, showing how far the rover has traveled and what its geographical coordinates are. The topographical simulations on the map are based on extensive imaging data gathered from numerous cameras already in orbit around Mars and provide extensive, weirdly familiar looking sights for anyone who’s pored over satellite map imagery of Earth.
Getting the word
Transmitting data back to Earth during the high-risk, nerve-wracking landing sequence took many systems working simultaneously and involving many parts. Detailed, larger packets of information traveled on ultrahigh frequencies (UHF) and passed from the spacecraft to satellites already in place orbiting Mars and then to Earth. Smaller, simpler packets of information – mostly telemetry data – flowed through X-band signals, which can travel directly from Mars to Earth as long as there is line-of-sight access between the planets. Different forms of transmission take different amounts of time to make the long journey through space, so project engineers had to make careful decisions about what information to transmit via which channel, depending on what they really wanted and needed to know and when.
And now
With Perseverance safely landed on Mars, project members turn to the next phase of exploration and experimentation. It will take about a month to ensure all the machinery is in working order and to upload new software to guide the rover on its search for signs of life on Mars. And it will be another 10 years or so before the mission launches to retrieve the geological samples to be collected by Perseverance. Meanwhile, we continue studying and enjoying the great accomplishments of the mission. What were your favorite parts? What jumped out at you? Please share your thoughts with us, and share our thoughts with any interested friends or colleagues.
Eric Iversen is VP for Learning and Communications at Start Engineering. He has written and spoken widely on STEM education and related careers. You can write to him about this topic, especially when he gets stuff wrong, at eiversen@start-engineering.com.
You can also follow along on Twitter @StartEnginNow.
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