Feb. 19, 2021 – After years of planning, designing, calculating, recalculating, building and then more planning to take into account a global pandemic, NASA’s Perseverance rover persevered yesterday. It successfully landed on Mars, beaming back pictures right away. There is joy at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California where the Mars 2020 mission is based. And there is joy at points around the world where engineers and scientists collaborated on the audacious mission. Did you know the rover has a helicopter attached to its belly?
Watching NASA TV for the last few minutes before the rover, which is about the size of a car, landed on the Red Planet was as riveting a play-by-play broadcast as any sport could deliver.
To slow its descent, the rover’s parachute opened when the rover was about 15 kilometers (km) above the surface of Mars. At that point, it was traveling about 400 meters per second. The parachute worked as designed. The rover decreased to subsonic speed at which point its heat shield came off as planned. At 9.5km above the Red Planet’s surface, the rover had slowed to 145 meters per second.
From that point on, the NASA announcer methodically reported decreasing altitude and decreasing speed. The following data points were reported:
1. altitude: 4.2 km; speed: 90 meters per second
2. 2.6 km; 83 meters/sec
3. 1.0 km; 75 meters/sec
4. 300 meters; 30 meters/sec
And then, Perseverance landed! Confirmation was announced from JPL at 3:55 p.m. EST.
“This landing is one of those pivotal moments for NASA, the United States, and space exploration globally – when we know we are on the cusp of discovery and sharpening our pencils, so to speak, to rewrite the textbooks,” Steve Jurczyk, acting NASA administrator, said in a press release. “The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission embodies our nation’s spirit of persevering even in the most challenging of situations, inspiring, and advancing science and exploration. The mission itself personifies the human ideal of persevering toward the future and will help us prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.”
According to NASA, the rover weighs 2,263-pounds (1,026-kilogram). It’s considered a robotic geologist and astrobiologist. It will undergo several weeks of testing before it begins its two-year science investigation of Mars’ Jezero Crater.
While the rover will investigate the rock and sediment of Jezero’s ancient lakebed and river delta to characterize the region’s geology and past climate, a fundamental part of its mission is astrobiology. That includes the search for signs of ancient microbial life.
To achieve that goal, the Mars Sample Return campaign, being planned by NASA and ESA (European Space Agency), will allow scientists on Earth to study samples collected by Perseverance to search for definitive signs of past life using instruments too large and complex to send to the Red Planet.
“Because of today’s exciting events, the first pristine samples from carefully documented locations on another planet are another step closer to being returned to Earth,” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator, said in a press release. “Perseverance is the first step in bringing back rock and regolith from Mars. We don’t know what these pristine samples from Mars will tell us. But what they could tell us is Word of the Day monumental – including that life might have once existed beyond Earth.”
With two years of science investigations possible because of the successful landing, NASA engineers and scientists have an exciting future ahead of them!
UPDATE: Feb. 20, 2021 (8:15 a.m. EST) – NASA released an amazing high resoution photo of the rover soon after landing on Mars. The photo was captured from video taken of the landing. NASA engineers and scientists are analyzing data the rover is sending and working on the video.
