How British brilliance put ‘rover’ on Mars
FASCINATING images of Mars were beamed back to Earth yesterday thanks to British ingenuity that put NASA’s Perseverance rover safely on the planet surface.
The probe landed flawlessly, touching down on its intended site 34 million miles away in the Jezero Crater where it will look for signs of microbial life.
But after travelling at more than six times faster than a bullet, reaching speeds of up to 12,000mph, it was thanks to a Devon company that Perseverance managed to slow to 1.7mph.
The importance of Heathcoat Fabrics in Tiverton could not be underestimated by the agency’s head of descent and landing.
Al Chen said: “Obviously there’s a lot of concentrated risk in supersonic parachute opening.”
Around 100 people at Heathcoat Fabrics worked on making the material for the 70ft supersonic parachute to help survive the “seven minutes of terror” after entering Mars’ atmosphere.
Director Peter Hill said: “I’m just hoping that everything goes to plan. It would be amazing for everyone that worked on this if life was found on Mars.
“It’s only when you’re watching footage coming back from space that you get really nervous, especially from the moment of deployment until the point that the parachute is actually working.”
Plunged
A picture, taken by a satellite orbiting the planet, showed the rover and its parachute as it plunged towards the surface on Thursday. Another image, released yesterday, was taken from the parachute assembly as it landed.
Yesterday the six-wheeled rover – the ninth spacecraft since the 1970s to successfully land on Mars – was completing a series of tests. Microphones were recording what the surface sounds like.
The team will stabilise the robot’s systems so that new, surface-tailored software can be uploaded from Earth, deputy project manager Jennifer Trosper said.
As this “critical infrastructure” work is proceeding, “we’re also doing other health checks of other instruments,” she added.
Referring to the Martian day, or sol, she said: “Over the course of the three sols or four sols of these early activities, we’ll get all the instrument health checks done. We’ll charge the 0 battery.”
One sol lasts 24 hours and 40 minutes.
High-definition images will start being taken tomorrow. The camera can zoom in and out and take 3D pictures.
Perseverance however faces an unprecedented set of challenges as it hopes to collect samples for future analysis over the next decade.
The plan, known as Mars Sample Return, involves three missions spanning the next 10 years and again sees heavy involvement from British teams.
Researchers from Imperial College London and the Natural History Museum will help the mission select the Martian rock and soil samples to be brought back from Mars as it searches for evidence of old microbial life.
From Imperial College London, Professor Sanjeev Gupta will help oversee mission operations from a science and engineering point of view.
And Professor Mark Sephton will help identify samples that could contain evidence of past life.
He said: “I hope that the samples we select and return will help current and future generations of scientists answer the question of whether there was ever life on the Red Planet.
“With one carefully chosen sample from Mars, we could discover that the history of life on the Earth is not unique in the universe.”
Professor Caroline Smith from London’s Natural History Museum will be studying the different rocks found in craters.
Acting agency administrator Steve Jurczyk said: “We are on the cusp of discovery and sharpening our pencils, so to speak, to rewrite the textbooks.”