Is there life on Mars? Tiverton helps find out
THE names of places closely linked to space exploration trip off the tongue.
Houston and Cape Canaveral are hard-wired into the minds of space nuts who have watched launches and listened to anxious control rooms for decades.
Florida’s Kennedy Space Centre, where many rockets and other craft are displayed, is known around the world. Even the UK’s National Space Centre, in Leicester, has built a reputation as Britain’s answer to NASA.
But now a new place name can be added to the list: Tiverton.
A company from the Mid-Devon town is playing a key role in the search for life on Mars, helping NASA to last night land a robot on the surface of the red planet.
Tiverton-based Heathcoat Fabrics has supplied the materials for the parachute designed to allow the Perseverance rover to drop safely onto Mars. It was due to touch down at 8.55pm UK time – as the WMN went to press.
The UK Government-backed mission, dubbed Mars 2020, set off from Florida in July last year and will hopefully collect samples to be studied. It will set them aside until 2026 when a retrieval rover is launched to collect them.
The rover – a six-wheeled scientific laboratory the size of a car – was due to make a smooth landing in a 28-mile-wide depression, containing sediments of an ancient river delta after a seven-month, 470 million km journey, thanks to the Heathcoatmade parachute.
The mission could provide evidence of life on the planet, if any has ever existed there. Rocks and gravel are among the items which will be studied.
One of the challenges faced by those monitoring the operation is the 11.5-minute time lag between the two planets, meaning the rover will have to fly itself rather than rely on human input.
Fabrics supplied by the Devon company have already been used to successfully land the Huygens probe on Titan, Beagle 2 on Mars and to return space capsules to Earth from the International Space Station.
Peter Hill, a director at Heathcoat
Fabrics, said before touchdown yesterday that the most nervous part of the mission will be waiting the ‘seven long minutes of terror’ as Perseverance makes its final descent into Mars’s atmosphere. “At that point there’s a total blackout and you don’t know what’s going to happen until the rover lands,” he said. “So, as it passes through the atmosphere of Mars and the parachute opens, we don’t really know what’s going on ’til it’s safely landed and operating.”
The rover will also carry the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, which will fly short distances from the rover in the first attempt at powered, controlled flight on another planet.