Perseverance rover sticks its Mars landing
NASA’s legion of Mars explorers was joined by its newest recruit on Thursday when the Perseverance rover entered the atmosphere traveling some 12,500 mph.
The 1-ton NASA rover maneuvered to a safe spot in Jezero Crater, slowed to about 1.7 mph and then was lowered to the planet’s surface by cables that dangled beneath a jetpack-powered sky crane.
The rover’s older siblings that are circling the planet, the Mars Reconnaissance and MAVEN
orbiters, collected data from above while the InSight lander and Curiosity rover continued their work probing the Martian surface. It’s a heritage that Perseverance is simultaneously building upon and advancing as the largest, most sophisticated rover to land on the Red Planet.
“Nine successful landings on Mars,” NASA Acting Administrator Steve Jurczyk said in a news conference after Perseverance landed. “The only nation that’s been able to do that. Just incredible.”
Perseverance will look for
signs of past microbial life on Mars, and it will collect rock and soil samples that a future mission could return to Earth. This has been a longheld goal of scientists who want to scrutinize pieces of the Martian surface with instruments that are too large and complex to launch into space.
So when NASA confirmed the vehicle’s landing Thursday at 2:55 p.m. CST, socially distanced teams erupted into applause and fist pumps at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. The mission control room wasn’t as full as it would normally be for such a milestone, but the excitement could be seen in a live video provided by NASA. Other team members, with their children and pets, made a virtual appearance cheering and waving from their homes during the post-landing news conference.
Perseverance, or Percy, as some are calling it, launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on July 30 amid a global pandemic. It landed, more than six months later, and that pandemic had not yet been squelched.
“We hoped that the situation on our world with respect to COVID would have improved since launch. It has not,” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, said during a news conference prior to Perseverance’s landing. “And that has meant that we’ve needed to be flexible and adapt to keep working safely and effectively.”
The rover’s first task upon reaching Mars is to send back pictures. Its initial images, taken through a protective lens cap (higher quality photos will become available later), show rocks, sand dunes, the cliffs of an ancient river delta and the shadow of Perseverance.
The Perseverance team will take more than a month to inspect the rover and load new software. It took years to build Perseverance and fly it to Mars, but the mission is just now beginning.
Plans for Perseverance were approved during President Barack Obama’s administration. The rover reached Mars less than one month after President Joe Biden was sworn into office, and Biden called Jurczyk on Thursday to congratulate the team.
“He talked about how proud he was of what we’d accomplished,” Jurczyk said, “and he wanted me to send his regards to Percy. He wanted me to congratulate the team for him. He does want to congratulate the team personally, and I told him we will make that happen.”
Biden, who is displaying a moon rock in the Oval Office, has not provided much detail on his vision for space. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said on Feb. 4 that the administration supports the Artemis Program, which is seeking to return humans to the moon.
However, NASA might not put boots on the moon in 2024 as President Donald Trump wanted. In an interview with Ars Technica, Jurczyk said that may not be a realistic target “due to the last two years of appropriations, which did not provide enough funding to make 2024 achievable.”
Ultimately, Artemis will prepare NASA to send humans to Mars. And as a precursor to this, Perseverance is testing new technologies to aid human exploration.
The rover is carrying spacesuit fabrics developed at NASA's Johnson Space Center. One of its instruments will measure temperature, wind speed and direction, pressure, relative humidity and dust size and shape — information astronauts would need to live and work safely on the planet.
A technology demonstration will attempt to turn carbon dioxide from Mars’ atmosphere into oxygen. This could be used for breathing and, more importantly, as propellant for launching rockets off the Martian surface and back to Earth.
Attached to the rover’s belly is a 4-pound helicopter, named Ingenuity, that is that is set to have the first powered flight on another planet. On Mars, the gravity is about one-third of Earth’s gravity and the atmosphere is just 1 percent as thick, which makes it harder for a vehicle to generate lift. To make the helicopter light enough to take off, its computer, electronics and other components have been miniaturized.
If successful, helicopters could serve as a scouts or make deliveries for future astronauts away from their base.
But the main mission of Perseverance is to search the Red Planet for signs of ancient microbial life. It will look for biosignatures — patterns, textures or substances that require the influence of life to form.
Scientists are hoping to find something like a stromatolite, which on Earth are wavy, rocky mounds formed long ago by microbial life. They can be found along ancient shorelines.
“Such biosignatures are the oldest undisputed evidence of life on Earth,” Ken Farley, the mission’s project scientist and a professor of geochemistry at Caltech, said during a news conference prior to Perseverance’s landing. “Rocks that are 3.5 billions years old, that occur in Western Australia and several other places, tell us that life was abundant on Earth 3.5 billion years ago.”
Some 3.5 billion years ago, Jezero Crater had a river delta and was filled with water.
“This is a tantalizing similarity,” Farley said.
Officials with previous Mars missions considered landing in Jezero Crater, an area surrounded by craters, rocks and a cliff, but the technology wasn’t yet advanced enough to navigate the obstacles. Perseverance stuck the landing. After its various health checks, the rover will begin its mission. Perseverance will collect rock and soil samples and leave them in caches on the planet’s surface. NASA and the European Space Agency are planning future missions to return those samples to Earth.
“A mission like this is a lot like a decade-long relay race,” Farley said during the post-landing news conference. “There was the whole first stage where the whole spacecraft was designed and built and, literally, as the pandemic was closing in, was raced off to the Cape to make the launch. The second leg was to get through space and arrive successfully as we have just done. And the third leg is the one that we are about to embark on. That’s the science mission.”