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Feb 18, 2021 · The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s Moon to Mars approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet. JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the Mars 2020 Perseverance mission and the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter technology demonstration for NASA.
- Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Jul 30, 2020 · The rover will characterize the planet's geology and past climate and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith, paving the way for human exploration of the Red Planet. Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA, will send spacecraft to Mars to collect these cached samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.
Feb 8, 2021 · After a nearly seven-month journey to Mars, NASA’s Perseverance rover is slated to land at the Red Planet’s Jezero Crater Feb.18, 2021, a rugged expanse chosen for its scientific research and sample collection possibilities. But the very features that make the site fascinating to scientists also make it a relatively dangerous place to land ...
Feb 8, 2021 · How two new technologies will help Perseverance, NASA’s most sophisticated rover yet, touch down onto the surface of Mars this month. After a nearly seven-month journey to Mars, NASA’s Perseverance rover is slated to land at the Red Planet’s Jezero Crater Feb. 18, 2021, a rugged expanse chosen for its scientific research and sample collection possibilities.
- Jet Propulsion Laboratory
- Overview
- 300 million miles to another world
- Getting the rover’s bearings
- Stretching its wheels
After a harrowing plunge through the thin Martian atmosphere, the robotic explorer ‘Percy’ can begin its landmark hunt for signs of ancient life
It’s wheels down for the newest robot to inhabit Mars. Just before 4 p.m. eastern time, the hulking, multibillion-dollar NASA rover Perseverance landed safely on the red planet after a 300-million-mile journey and a nerve-racking plunge to the Martian surface.
"Touchdown confirmed. Perseverance is safely on the surface of Mars," said Swati Mohan, an engineer on the Perseverance team.
The one-ton, nuclear-powered Perseverance made a swift, acrobatic descent through the thin Martian atmosphere that, if all went well, has been captured on video for the first time. The rover autonomously timed its movements so that it would alight within a roughly four-mile-wide landing ellipse in Mars’s Jezero Crater, which once hosted a deep and potentially long-lived lake.
Perseverance then confirmed its safe arrival with a signal relayed to Earth via the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter—and it sent its first photos from its perch on the surface, sparking socially distanced celebrations at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. In JPL’s mission control, matching face masks muffled shouts of excitement, but the team’s relief and jubilation was still very evident.
“These missions are hard—there are a lot of things that have to go right,” says JPL’s Jennifer Trosper, Perseverance’s deputy project manager. “There are no guarantees. That’s what makes it exciting.”
Perseverance set sail for Mars on July 30, 2020. For seven months, it cruised through space tucked up inside its spacecraft like a bug inside its protective shell. The rover’s six wheels were pulled inward, its mast and robotic arm folded, and a small helicopter named Ingenuity was snuggled beneath its belly. Teams at JPL periodically woke the rover during the flight, testing its onboard systems and grabbing a brief audio clip via its onboard microphones.
“I was, I think, the first person to receive the audio files when we turned on the microphone during cruise,” says JPL’s Adam Nelessen. “And to hear kind of a mechanical whirring sound, to experience [spaceflight] in that other sense, is really visceral and thrilling.”
But on February 18, the most crucial portion of the rover’s journey began—a do-or-die sequence of events known as entry, descent, and landing, or EDL.
“There’s no partial credit in EDL,” says team member Gregory Villar. “There are thousands of little things, and large things, that can go wrong.”
During the end of its cruise phase, Perseverance was zooming toward Mars at a blazing 12,100 miles an hour—much too fast to land safely. Once it hit the Martian atmosphere, the drag on the spacecraft slowed its descent to less than 1,000 miles an hour, and then a parachute slowed it to about 200 miles an hour.
But that planet’s air is too thin for a parachute alone to safely deposit such a heavy machine, so it then initiated a sequence of carefully choreographed maneuvers to further slow its descent. After deploying its chute, ditching its heat shield, and finding a safe spot to land, Perseverance completed the last leg with the help of a somewhat improbable-sounding device called a sky crane.
Now in Jezero Crater, the rover’s work begins in earnest. During its primary mission, Perseverance will read the geologic history of Jezero and look for any clues about past alien inhabitants. It will also select and cache rock samples that a future rover will fetch and return to Earth sometime within the next decade.
After an intense competition among landing sites, scientists selected Jezero from four final contenders because of clear evidence that it was once filled with water, and because a massive river delta near the western crater rim is rich in sediments that could preserve biological material.
7:22
Why mapping Mars completely changed how we see it
Mars has drawn our attention for millennia as the planet next door and a scientific object, but it was when we started mapping the planet that we began to see it as a place. Early mapmaking led to scientific discoveries—and a few far-fetched theories—which changed how we see the planet today.
But Jezero, with its boulders, cliff edges, and potentially problematic sand traps, wasn’t the safest place to send a rover—and Perseverance wouldn’t have been able to make it there without some upgrades to previous landing technologies.
During the rover’s early days in Jezero, teams will be focusing on checking out the onboard systems and making sure everything is working properly.
“The very first day we don’t do much, because we land in the afternoon, and Earth is already set,” Trosper says, referring to the fact that our home world will have sunk below the Martian horizon from the rover’s perspective. That means any communication with the rover will rely on orbiting spacecraft, which will be flying overhead every several hours or so. Onboard software will start switching over to surface operations mode, and the team will unlock some of the rover’s appendages that were stowed during flight and descent.
Perseverance will snap some images from its perch on the surface, and those should be relayed back to Earth via one of the orbiters. And then the rover will go to sleep to recharge its batteries, waking only if an orbiter is near.
Over the next few Martian days, Perseverance will deploy its high-gain antenna and try to find Earth while making sure it can keep its batteries charged and onboard instruments warm. Once the team is satisfied that the rover is on stable ground, it will deploy its remote sensing mast, where multiple cameras are located, and take a series of 360-degree panoramas. The rover will continue slowly transitioning from its landing software to surface software, a process that Trosper says will take about a week.
“It’s a dance, a lot of steps, and it’s on Mars, and if it goes bad … it’s hard,” Trosper says. “This is my fifth rover, and I’ve been part of every rover anomaly we’ve ever had, and you just really don’t want to get into these situations.”
Once the software checks are complete, about a week or two into the mission, the rover will move its robotic arm and go for a short spin. It’ll continue to test onboard instruments, and likely in a few months, the Ingenuity helicopter will make its first attempt at powered flight on another planet.
Jan 26, 2024 · The Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter landed in Mars’s Jezero crater on February 18, 2021, NASA’s latest mission to explore the red planet. Landing on Mars is an incredibly difficult feat that has challenged engineers for decades: while missions like Curiosity have succeeded, its surface is littered with the wreckage of many failures as well.
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Jan 6, 2021 · NASA’s Perseverance rover completes its journey to Mars on Feb. 18, 2021. To reach the surface of the Red Planet, it has to survive the harrowing final phase known as Entry, Descent, and Landing. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech. More than 3.5 billion years ago, a river there flowed into a body of water about the size of Lake Tahoe, depositing ...
