‘Perserverance’ rover safely on Mars
CAPE CANAVERAL: A Nasa rover streaked through the orange Martian sky yesterday and landed on the planet, accomplishing the riskiest step yet in an epic quest to bring back rocks that could answer whether life ever existed on Mars.
Ground controllers at the space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, cheered and exchanged highfives in triumph — and relief — on receiving confirmation yesterday that the sixwheeled Perseverance had touched down on the red planet, long a deathtrap for spacecraft.
It took a tensionfilled 111⁄2 minutes for the signal to reach Earth.
‘‘Touchdown confirmed! Perseverance safely on the surface of Mars, ready to begin seeking signs of past life,’’ flight controller Swati Mohan announced.
The landing marks the third visit to Mars in just over a week. Two spacecraft from the United Arab Emirates and China swung into orbit around Mars on successive days last week. All three missions lifted off in July, to take advantage of the close alignment of Earth and Mars, journeying 472 million km.
Perseverance, the biggest, most advanced rover yet sent by Nasa, became the ninth spacecraft to successfully land on Mars, every one of them from the US, beginning in the 1970s.
The carsize, plutoniumpowered vehicle arrived at Jezero Crater, hitting Nasa’s smallest and trickiest target yet: a 5200ha strip on an ancient river delta full of pits, cliffs and fields of rock. Scientists believe that if life ever flourished on Mars, it would have happened three billion to four billion years ago, when water still flowed on the planet.
In the next two years, Perseverance will use its 2m arm to drill down and collect rock samples with possible signs of bygone microscopic life. Three to four dozen chalksize samples will be sealed in tubes to be retrieved by a fetch rover and brought homeward by another rocket ship, as early as 2031.
Scientists hope to answer one of the central questions of theology, philosophy and space exploration.
‘‘Are we alone in this sort of vast cosmic desert, just flying through space, or is life much more common? Does it just emerge whenever and wherever the conditions are ripe?’’ deputy project scientist Ken Williford said.
‘‘We’re really on the verge of being able to potentially answer these enormous questions.’’
Perseverance was on its own during the Nasadescribed ‘‘seven minutes of terror’’ descent.
Flight controllers waited helplessly as the preprogrammed spacecraft hit the thin, 95% CO2 Martian atmosphere at 19,500kmh, or 16 times the speed of sound, slowing as it plummeted.
It released its parachute, jettisoned its heat shield, and then used a rocketsteered platform known as a sky crane to lower the rover the final 20m to the surface.
Perseverance promptly sent back a grainy, blackandwhite photo of Mars’ surface .
Nasa is teaming up with the European Space Agency to bring the rocks home. Perseverance’s mission alone costs nearly $US3 billion ($NZ4.2 billion).