For Mars rover, ‘seven minutes of terror’
Perseverance will look for evidence of life on the Red Planet
Seven months after it launched into space, NASA’s robotic rover Perseverance today will enter the final “seven minutes of terror” as it autopilots its own landing onto the Red Planet with no communication from Earth.
Not only is Perseverance, at $2.7 billion, the biggest, most autonomous rover NASA has ever produced, it’s also attempting to land at the trickiest location on Mars ever attempted. And thanks to an advanced camera system and an innovative new microphone, we’ll not only be able to watch in high resolution but also hear — for the first time ever — what it’s ac
“The potential for aerial reconnaissance and exploration in the future using this type of technology is terrific. It’s not just on Mars but other places as well.”
tually like to land on Mars.
Though NASA has successfully landed eight of its nine spacecraft on Mars, including four previous rovers from Sojourner in 1997 to Curiosity in 2012, there is no guarantee that Perseverance will be successful.
“We’ve got 2 million lines of software code running. Hundreds of thousands of electronic parts, miles of copper conductors, more than 70 pyrotechnic devices that all have to fire,” said Matt Wallace, Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Perseverance deputy project manager, in a news conference Wednesday. “All systems must operate with sub-second precision for all this to work,” he said. On Mars, Wallace noted, “there are no retries.”
Allen Chen, the systems engineer who leads Perseverance’s entry, descent and landing, or EDL, added that it’s been key for the team to learn from past mistakes. “If you don’t stay humble in this business and especially going to Mars, you’re going to pay for it.” But, he added Wednesday, “We’ve done everything we can think of to make sure that we have a good day tomorrow.”
This will be NASA’s fifth Mars rover and its first astrobiology mission since Viking in 1976 to actively search for signs of extraterrestrial microbial life. The landing site is the complex and bumpy terrain near Jezero Crater, which was once an ancient lake — making it a potential hotbed for microorganisms. Perseverance will collect samples of Martian rock and soil and leave them on the planet’s surface. The goal is for a future robotic mission to collect the samples from Mars and bring them back to Earth, where scientists will analyze them for signs of past life. The core samples will also help us better understand the Red Planet’s climate and geology.
While car-sized Perseverance has the same body as Curiosity, a key difference is the large robotic arm out front. Perseverance’s arm has a larger “hand” that contains the coring drill, two scientific instruments and a color camera that will allow engineers to inspect the machinery for health checkups.
Additional upgrades include better autonomous driving and stronger wheels, making Perseverance faster and more nimble as it maneuvers around the planet’s tricky surface. In addition to the microphone for EDL, a second microphone will allow NASA to listen to the ambient soundscape on the surface of the planet.
NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View made key contributions to the Perseverance mission, including developing the thermal shield that will protect the rover during landing. NASA Ames also helped develop the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter that’s riding to Mars on the belly of the rover. Once Perseverance has landed, Ingenuity will test-drive the first power-controlled flight on another planet. If it works, this technology has the potential to transform planetary exploration.
“Ingenuity is today’s Sojourner,” said Wallace, referencing NASA’s Sojourner rover that landed on Mars in 1997. Sojourner was the first wheeled vehicle to be used on another planet in the solar system and paved the way for today’s Mars rovers.
“The potential for aerial reconnaissance and exploration in the future using this type of technology is terrific,” said Wallace. “It’s not just on Mars but other places as well.”
A second onboard experiment is called MOXIE, or Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment. This one will attempt to derive oxygen from the planet’s thin, carbon dioxide-heavy atmosphere to see if it can be used as rocket fuel for future takeoffs or even potentially for astronauts.
The makeup of Perseverance’s engineering team also differs from the senior engineers who worked on Curiosity. On the Perseverance team, “there are a lot of very seasoned veterans of Mars exploration,” said Adam Steltzner, NASA chief engineer of the Perseverance mission, “but largely, the rank and file were younger engineers, many for whom this was the first flight project.”
Regardless of how Perseverance’s landing goes, “the experience that this epic eight-year investment has brought them will be with them forever,” Steltzner told them in the final pre-landing day meeting. For young people interested in space exploration, Steltzner’s advice is to “follow that excitement and stay curious.”
“Mars has so much to tell us about the early history of the solar system, of the formation of the planets, the evolution of the rocky planets,” said Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division. “Being able to have Mars in our nursery of planets here in the solar system is a fantastic laboratory to understand the diversity of planets and the diversity of geologic and climate evolution.”
Mars is and will continue to be an “absolutely incredibly compelling destination for many decades to come,“Glaze said.
— Matt Wallace, Perseverance deputy project manager at JPL