Still, NASA has been on a roll with its rovers in recent years - first with Spirit and Opportunity, which landed in 2004, and then with the heftier Curiosity, which is still chugging along. Humans have been exploring Mars robotically for more than half a century, and roughly half the missions (including those operated by other countries) have failed. “Success depends on everything going right, down to fractions of a second. “We’re basically watching the spacecraft disassemble itself as it’s hurtling toward the ground,” Wallace said. All these things have to work with exquisite precision and entirely autonomously. It is the hardest part of the mission, fraught with opportunities for what aerospace engineers call “a bad day.” The EDL requires a heat shield, a parachute, rocket thrusters and a sky crane that finally lowers the rover to the surface. Finding a second data point for life would be one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science.īut first the engineers have to pull off the EDL - the entry, descent and landing. Either way, NASA wants the soil samples back for study in laboratories, hoping to answer fundamental questions about life in the solar system and beyond. Or those instruments might detect nothing remotely suggestive of life. Perseverance has instruments that might detect structures consistent with ancient life on the Red Planet. NASA describes this as an astrobiology mission. NASA’s human spaceflight program aims for a return mission to the moon in coming years, but Mars remains the horizon goal. Perseverance will do more than probe the surface: It will also test technologies that someday could be used on Mars by astronauts, including a system for converting atmospheric carbon dioxide to oxygen. The rover is poised to land just days after two other robotic spacecraft, launched by China and the United Arab Emirates, reached Mars and went into orbit.
This is one of NASA’s most important endeavors, the first multibillion-dollar Mars mission in nine years and the initial phase of a three-mission campaign to return samples of Martian soil to Earth. Hitting the 4.8-mile-wide landing site targeted by NASA after a journey of 300 million miles is akin to throwing a dart from the White House and scoring a bull’s eye in Dallas. Somehow, that velocity has to reach zero, with the rover deposited lovingly on the surface inside a crater named Jezero. The spacecraft carrying Perseverance, which launched from Earth at the end of July, is expected to arrive on Thursday at Mars at 12,000 miles per hour - six times faster than a bullet shot from an M16 - in what amounts to a controlled collision. This is one of the hardest technological feats human beings have ever attempted. He has a simple way of describing what the space agency expects him and his fellow engineers to do: “Land a car on Mars.” One cataloger is Matt Wallace, deputy project manager for NASA’s Perseverance rover mission. That planned rover is expected to launch the samples back into space to link up with other spacecraft for an eventual Earth homecoming around 2031.They call it the “seven minutes of terror,” which doesn’t do justice to the weeks of anxiety, troubleshooting, second-guessing, sleepless nights - the mental cataloguing of all that could go wrong and all that must go exactly right. The rover is also intended to help bring Martian rock samples back to Earth, collecting materials in cigar-sized capsules and leaving them in various spots on the surface for retrieval by a future "fetch" rover. Perseverance will conduct an experiment to convert elements of the carbon dioxide-rich Martian atmosphere into propellant for future rockets launching off the planet's surface, or to produce breathable oxygen for future astronauts. The United States has plans to send astronauts to Mars in the 2030s under a program that envisions using a return to the moon as a testing platform for human missions before making the more ambitious crewed journey to Mars. NASA also has successfully sent three landers - Pathfinder, Phoenix and InSight. Since NASA's first Mars rover Sojourner landed in 1997, the agency has sent two others - Spirit and Opportunity - that have explored the geology of expansive Martian plains and detected signs of past water formations, among other discoveries.
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