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The mission is timed for launch when Earth and Mars are in good positions relative to each other for landing on Mars. That is, it takes less power to travel to Mars at this time, compared to other times when Earth and Mars are in different positions in their orbits. As Earth and Mars orbit the Sun at different speeds and distances, about once ...
Feb 17, 2021 · Live NASA TV commentary starts at 2:15 p.m. EST (11:15 a.m. PST) on Feb. 18. Engineers expect to receive notice of key milestones for landing at the estimated times below. (Because of the distance the signals have to travel from Mars to Earth, these events actually take place on Mars 11 minutes, 22 seconds earlier than what is noted here.)
Mar 5, 2021 · On Feb. 18, 2021, the world watched live as NASA’s Mars 2020 mission team attempted the most daring part of its mission: landing the Perseverance rover on the surface of Mars. Viewers around the world tuned in to watch the harrowing entry, descent, and landing on TVs, computers, and on giant screens in major cities.
- Overview
- Looking for signs of past life
Update: Perseverance landed successfully on Thursday — read the latest story here. Our earlier coverage is below.
NASA's Perseverance Mars rover closed in on the red planet after a journey of 293 million miles, hurtling toward a nail-biting seven-minute descent to touchdown Thursday. The mission is an unprecedented attempt to find signs of past microbial life at the site of an ancient Martian river, delta and lakebed.
Mission managers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said that the spacecraft was healthy and flawlessly executing its final approach to Jezero Crater as it readied for a high-speed descent that engineers only half jokingly refer to as "seven minutes of terror."
Asked Wednesday what the odds might be for a successful landing, deputy project manager Matt Wallace said the sheer complexity of the 2,260-pound rover, the heaviest and most sophisticated ever sent to Mars, makes it difficult to predict.
"We've got two million lines of software code running hundreds of thousands of electronic parts, miles of copper conductors, we've got more than 70 pyrotechnic devices that all have to fire, closed-loop guidance and navigation control systems that really have to operate with sub-second precision for all this to work," he said.
"There (are) no go backs. There (are) no retries. It's a difficult and dangerous part of the mission. ... I think we've done everything we can to make it successful. And we'll see how it goes tomorrow."
If Perseverance makes it down safely, the robot geologist will be poised to possibly answer one of the most profound questions in modern science: Are we alone? Or did life, however primitive, manage to evolve on another world and, by extension, might it exist on countless other worlds across the cosmos?
Jezero Crater was targeted because about 3.5 billion years ago it held a 28-mile-wide body of water the size of Lake Tahoe that was fed by a river cutting through the rim of the crater and depositing sediments in a fan-like delta clearly visible from orbit. Perseverance is targeting a landing on the floor of the lakebed just beyond the delta.
Engineers plan to spend about 90 days checking out the rover's complex instruments and systems. During the first month, they also plan to deploy and test a small 4.5-pound, $80 million helicopter — Ingenuity — that will attempt the first powered flight in the thin air of Mars, a "Wright brothers' moment" on another planet.
Another experiment will test the feasibility of extracting oxygen from the Martian atmosphere, technology that could help future astronauts produce their own air and rocket fuel. But the primary goal of the mission is to look for signs of past biological activity.
Equipped with a robot arm, a core-sampling drill and a suite of sophisticated cameras, rock-vaporizing lasers and other instruments, Perseverance will study lakebed deposits, venture across the delta and eventually make its away up to the ancient lake's shoreline, collecting promising samples along the way.
Selected rocks and soil will be placed in a complex internal carousel mechanism that will autonomously photograph, analyze and load them in lipstick-size air-tight tubes that eventually will be deposited, or cached, on the surface.
- CBS News Space Consultant
- 9 min
- February 19, 2021
- William Harwood
Feb 17, 2021 · A long journey. The rover left for Mars on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V 541 rocket on July 30, 2020, with a 293-million-mile (471 million km) journey ahead of it. ... or 687 Earth days. Mars ...
Feb 18, 2021 · If NASA’s Perseverance rover lands safely on Mars, it will become the first space mission in nearly 45 years to directly search for signs of microbial life. Feb. 17, 2021 Next, the protective ...
- 132 min
- Karen Kaplan
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Feb 18, 2021 · The Perseverance rover landed on Mars at 20:55 GMT (15:55 ET) after almost seven months travelling from Earth. It is Nasa's most ambitious hunt for signs of life on Mars since the Viking missions ...
