Search for life on Mars begins
‘Perseverance’ on Red Planet after nail-biting landing phase
WASHINGTON: After seven months in space, Nasa’s Perseverance rover survived a nail-biting landing phase to touch down gently on the surface of Mars ready to embark on its mission to search for signs of ancient microbial life.
“Touchdown confirmed,” said operations lead Swati Mohan at around 3.55pm Eastern Time on Thursday, as mission control at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena erupted in cheers on Thursday.
The autonomously guided procedure was completed more than 11 minutes earlier, which is how long it takes for radio signals to return to Earth.
“WOW!!” tweeted Nasa Associate Administrator Thomas Zurbuchen as he posted Perseverance’s first black and white image from the Jezero Crater in Mars’ northern hemisphere.
Over the course of several years, Perseverance will attempt to collect 30 rock and soil samples, to be eventually sent back to Earth sometime in the 2030s for lab analysis.
About the size of an SUV, it weighs a ton, is equipped with a 2m-long robotic arm, has 19 cameras, two microphones, and a suite of cuttingedge instruments to assist in its scientific goals.
Before it could embark on its lofty quest, it first had to overcome the dreaded “seven minutes of terror” – the risky landing procedure that has scuppered nearly 50% of all missions to the planet.
Shortly after 3.30pm Eastern Time, the Mars 2020 spacecraft careened into the Martian atmosphere at 20,000kph, protected by its heat shield.
It then deployed a supersonic parachute the size of a Little League field, before firing up an eightengined jetpack to slow its descent further, and then lower the rover to the ground on a set of cables.
Its target site was “treacherous for landing,” Allen Chen, lead engineer for the landing stage said.
But the vessel had new landing technologies to help it navigate during descent, including “Terrain Relative Navigation” that uses a special camera to identify surface features.
Scientists believe that 3.5 billion years ago the crater was home to a river that flowed into a lake, depositing sediment in a fan-shaped delta.
“The question of whether there’s life beyond Earth is one of the most fundamental questions we can ask,” said Nasa geologist Katie Stack Morgan.
“Our ability to ask this question and develop the scientific investigations to answer it is one of the things that make us as a species so unique.” It will begin drilling its first samples in summer, and its engineers have planned for it to traverse the delta, then the ancient lake shore, and finally the edges of the crater.
Perseverance’s top speed of 2.5m per hour is sluggish by Earth standards but faster than its predecessors, and it will deploy new instruments to scan for organic matter, map chemical composition, and zap rocks with a laser to study the vapour.