We’ re on Mars... and we’re over the moon!
Nasa rover nail-biter, now the hunt for life
AFTER a seven-month voyage to Mars, it all came down to ‘the seven minutes of terror’.
Blasting through the atmosphere at 12,000mph, Nasa’s latest mission to search for alien life on the Red Planet faced its greatest test.
Several intricate manoeuvres had to be executed perfectly over seven heart-stopping minutes for a safe landing last night – and the £2billion Perseverance rover pulled each one off.
Nasa scientists were jubilant after waiting 11-and-a-half minutes while data was beamed nearly 34million miles, leaping up and punching the air at mission control in Pasadena, California.
Among the British scientists awaiting news was Professor Andrew Coates, of University College London, who is part of the Mastcam-Z project, which contains two of the 19 cameras on Perseverance, more than any other interplanetary mission.
He said: ‘There is a great possibility of failure in missions to Mars, so to see Perseverance land was absolutely fantastic.
‘If there wasn’t a pandemic, I would have been in Pasadena, throwing my arms up in celebration with the others. Instead I was at home in Guildford, but it was still very exciting. I have been holding my breath for this.’
The stakes were high for Nasa’s latest mission to Mars, the first to search for alien life since the Viking Landers in the 1970s, whose results were inconclusive.
Not only was it eight years in the making, about half of voyages to the Red Planet end up exploding or crash-landing.
Scientists call the entry, descent and landing the seven minutes of terror while they wait anxiously for the pre-programmed manoeuvres to deploy. First, Perseverance’s parachute had to eject to slow the descent and a platform called Sky Crane had to fire its rockets for further deceleration.
Next, a heat-resistant shield detached from the rover, and it finally touched down, avoiding jagged rocks, at about 8.40pm.
Unlike previous rovers, Perseverance will not only to look for signs of water or the ‘building blocks’ of existence – but for life itself, in the form of fossilised Martian microbes or the material they have left behind.
The rover, which is the size of a car and nicknamed ‘Percy’, landed in the Jezero crater, where a river flowed about 3.5 billion years ago and might have deposited signs of microbial life.
Perseverance will take soil and rock samples, which are due to be returned to Earth in 2031.
The mission will also trial a battery-powered helicopter called Ingenuity, which hopes to solve the challenge of staying airborne in the thin atmosphere. The experiment could help pave the way for manned trips to Mars.
Last week missions from the UAE and China reached Mars but did not land.