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How NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover will make the most difficult landing ever attempted on the red planet

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Currently hurtling through space, less than 25 million miles away from its destination, NASA’s Perseverance rover will soon make the most difficult landing ever attempted on Mars, before it begins its hunt for ancient life. 

When it arrives on February 18, Perseverance will enter Mars’ atmosphere at over 12,000 miles per hour, streaking across the Martian sky like a meteor for seven nail-biting minutes before finally touching down in the Jezero Crater, a site that the Curiosity rover was technologically incapable of reaching. 

NASA scientists call it the “seven minutes of terror.”

This illustration shows the events that occur in the final minutes of the nearly seven-month journey that NASA’s Perseverance rover takes to Mars. Hundreds of critical events must execute perfectly and exactly on time for the rover to land on Mars safely on Feb. 18, 2021. 

NASA/JPL-Caltech


The rover must survive both intense heat comparable to the sun’s surface and deceleration as it descends, while also trying to land in the correct place. A parachute 70 feet in diameter will help slow it down, as it attempts to find its way to the crater.

Then, a “skycrane,” which was also used by Curiosity, will allow Perseverance to lower itself onto the surface. When the rover finally lands, it will touch down on its wheels at a speed slower than humans walk. 

“I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that entry, descent and landing (EDL) is the most critical and most dangerous part of the mission,” Allen Chen, the EDL lead, said this week during a news conference. “Success is never assured, and that’s especially true when we’re trying to land the biggest, heaviest and most complicated rover we’ve ever built to the most dangerous site we’ve ever attempted to land on.” 

And Perseverance has to do this all on its own. It takes radio signals more than 11 minutes to get back to Earth, so the entirety of the EDL will be done without the help of mission control. 

With its heat shield facing the planet, NASA’s Perseverance rover begins its descent through the Martian atmosphere in this illustration.

NASA/JPL-Caltech


NASA chose the Jezero Crater as the landing site because scientists believe, based on orbital photographs of the region, that it was once filled with water, home to an ancient river delta. The water is long gone, but lakebed deposits make the crater an ideal place to investigate for signs of ancient life.

The crater is filled with steep cliffs, sand, boulders and impact craters, all of which make the landing more difficult. When Perseverance touches down, it must do so near the remnants of the delta, where traces of microbial organism could have settled. 

“Jezero Crater is a great place, a magnificent place for science. But when I look at it from a landing perspective, I see danger,” Chen said. “It’s a formidable challenge.” 

The Perseverance rover, which launched last July, is the biggest vehicle NASA has ever attempted to land on Mars, weighing over a metric ton and carrying 50% more science and technology than Curiosity, which landed in 2012. Two new technologies will help Perseverance land safely — a range trigger, which allows the rover to decide when to deploy the parachute, and terrain relative navigation, which essentially gives the rover eyes and a map, so it can check to make sure it lands in the right place. 

“If it wasn’t for range trigger and terrain relative navigation, we just could not go to Jezero,” Chen said.

An illustration of NASA’s Perseverance rover landing safely on Mars.

NASA/JPL-Caltech


The coronavirus pandemic has only further complicated the landing. 

“We hoped that the situation on our world with respect to COVID would have improved since launch. It has not, and that has meant that we’ve needed to be flexible and adapt to keep working safely and effectively,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate. “Regardless of everything that has happened due to COVID, it is the constant innovation, dedication and above else  unity of this team that has allowed work on the Perseverance rover to continue in a safe manner.”

Perseverance is carrying a ton of cool, new technology, including a tiny helicopter named Ingenuity and the necessary instruments to collect samples for future study on Earth. For the first time, we’ll also be able to see and hear what it’s like to land on another planet, thanks to a new camera and microphone system. 

These new and more precise EDL technologies will help enable human exploration of the red planet in the future, scientists said.

NASA will be live streaming the historic event on its website on February 18, beginning at 2:15 p.m. ET.

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Nasa’s Perseverance rover is bearing down on Mars

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The US space agency’s Perseverance rover is now just three weeks from arriving at Mars.

The robot and the Red Planet are still separated by some 4.5 million km (3 million miles), but this gap is closing at a rapid rate.

The biggest, most sophisticated vehicle ever sent to land on another planet, the Nasa robot is being targeted at a near-equatorial crater called Jezero.

Touchdown is expected shortly before 2100 GMT on Thursday 18 February.

To get down, the Nasa rover will have to survive what engineers call the “seven minutes of terror” – the time it takes to get from the top of the atmosphere to the surface.

The “terror” is a reference to the daunting challenge that is inherent in trying to reduce an entry speed of 20,000km/h to something like walking pace at the moment of “wheels down”.

“When the scientists look at our landing site, Jezero Crater, they see the scientific promise of everything: the remains of an ancient river flowing in and flowing out of this crater and think that’s the place to go to look for signs of past life. But when I look at Jezero, I see danger,” says Allen Chen, the engineer who leads the Entry, Descent and Landing (EDL) effort for Perseverance.

“There’s danger everywhere. There’s this 60-80m-tall cliff that cuts right through the middle of our landing site. If you look to the west, there are craters that the rover can’t get out of even if we were to land successfully in one of them. And if you look to the east, there are large rocks that our rover would be very unhappy about if we put down on them,” he told BBC News.

Fortunately, Perseverance has some tried and tested technologies that should ensure it reaches a safe point on the surface. Among them is the famous “Skycrane” jet pack that successfully landed Nasa’s previous rover, Curiosity, eight years ago.

There are even some additions designed to improve reliability. The parachute system that slows the atmospheric descent from super- to sub-sonic speeds now has something called “range trigger”. This more precisely times the opening of the parachute to bring the rover closer to its notional bulls-eye.

Unlike Curiosity which just opened the chute when it reached a pre-determined velocity, Perseverance will check its surroundings first before issuing the command.

Allied to this is Terrain Relative Navigation. Perseverance will be examining the ground below and checking it against satellite imagery of the crater to better gauge its position.

It’s like you or I looking out the window of our car and then looking back at a map to see where we are, says Chen.

“That’s what we’re asking Perseverance to do on her own, to figure out where she is, and then fly to known safe spots that are nearby.”

Curiosity managed to touch down about a mile from the notional bulls-eye. It overshot slightly. Perseverance, with its enhanced landing technologies, should do much better.

Scientists have already named the area that includes the bulls-eye. It’s called Timanfaya, named after the Spanish national park in Lanzarote, one of the Canary Islands.

The Lanzarote Timanfaya is a volcanic terrain; the Martian version, which encompasses a 1.2km by 1.2km square likely also includes some volcanic rock. It’s the floor of Jezero Crater.

Although this is the landing spot, it’s not the major interest for the mission. That’s the remnant delta just to the north, along with some more distant carbonate rocks which the researchers think may trace the edge of a once huge lake in Jezero.

“Carbonate rock is extremely abundant on Earth, but is quite rare on Mars and we’re not really sure why that is,” says Ken Farley, the Nasa project scientist on Perseverance.

“There’s a region on the edge of the crater that would have been the shore with a high concentration of carbonate. This is very attractive to us, because on Earth carbonate often is precipitated [by living organisms]: people will be familiar with things like coral reefs. And it is a good way to record bio-signatures,” he told BBC News.

Under the right conditions, stromatolites will form in shallow waters

The dream is Perseverance will stumble across fossil evidence of stromatolites. These are sedimentary deposits that have been built by layers, or mats, of micro-organisms.

The structures, and the chemistry within them, is recognisable to geologists. That said, we are talking about rocks in Jezero that are almost four billion years old.

Discoveries are unlikely to be of the slam-dunk variety, which is why Perseverance will package up its most interesting finds for later missions to retrieve and bring back to Earth for more detailed study.

Farley says Perseverance will be asking the most fundamental of questions and whatever answers its produces will be instructive.

“Is it a case of if you build a habitable environment then life will come? Or is it like a magic spark that also has to happen? And the answer to that question is really important, because we now know that there are billions, literally billions, of planets out there beyond Earth.

“What is the likelihood that life doesn’t exist out there? It seems small to me, but it all hinges on how ubiquitous that spark is that gets life going,” he explained.

The bulls-eye is in a square called Timanfaya. Carbonate rocks are coloured green

Originally published

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NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover landing will be must-see TV

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An illustration of Perseverance during its descent to the Martian surface.


NASA

NASA is just weeks away from landing a shiny new robot on the surface of Mars, and for the first time, we’ll be able to see and hear what it’s like to touch down on another world.

Perseverance is due to land in Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, becoming the first artificial object to land on the surface since the Mars Insight lander in 2018 and the first rover since Curiosity touched down in 2012.

But the new rover on the block is carrying more audio-visual gear than its predecessors to capture portions of the pivotal entry, descent and landing, or EDL, phase of the mission. A camera mounted on the back shell of the spacecraft is pointed up and will be able to catch a view of the parachutes that will deploy during descent to slow Perseverance as it comes in for its landing. Beneath this is a downward-pointing camera on the descent stage, which further slows and orients the rover for landing. 

Finally, the rover itself is equipped with cameras and a microphone. Altogether, this suite of tech should provide us with the most detailed images and audio of a landing on Mars yet.

“We’re going to be able to watch ourselves land for the first time on another planet,” Lori Glaze, who heads the Planetary Science Division of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, told reporters during a briefing Wednesday.

Perseverance carries its own audio-visual rigging.


NASA

The entire EDL phase will last only about seven minutes, but EDL lead Allen Chen calls it “the most critical and most dangerous part of the mission.”

Perseverance will hit the Martian atmosphere traveling at almost 12,000 miles per hour  (19,312 kilometers per hour), streaking across the sky as it begins to slow down. A 70-foot (21 meters) diameter parachute will deploy to slow it further. Afterward, its heat shield is released and radar is activated to help it determine its own location. 

At an altitude of about one mile (1.5 kilometers), the descent module fires its engines and a new terrain relative navigation system, or TRN, kicks in to identify a safe landing spot. TRN is basically a sort of computer vision that allows the spacecraft to look at the terrain below and match it up with maps in its database.


Now playing:
Watch this:

This is how NASA’s Perseverance rover will get Mars rocks…



2:06

The system slows down to a literal crawl, and then it’s time for “sky crane,” the same sort of hovering landing system the Curiosity rover used, which will allow Perseverance to basically lower itself softly to the surface.

This whole process will be fully automated without any input from mission control because of the delay in sending radio signals back and forth from Mars to the Earth.

Perseverance carries a number of science instruments to help look for signs of ancient life on our neighboring world, to collect samples that will be returned to Earth and to test some technologies for future Mars missions.

Also, it has a tiny helicopter.

Robots have spent years rolling around Mars, which is pretty cool, but for the first time NASA will use a small helicopter, dubbed Ingenuity, to try flying around the planet.


Now playing:
Watch this:

How NASA’s Mars helicopter could change the future of…



5:20

But before Ingenuity can fly, Perseverance has to nail its landing first. While its cameras and microphones will capture much of this whole process, there won’t be a live feed like we’ve become accustomed to from the International Space Station or most launches from Earth. That’s because the data relay Perseverance will be using during EDL is slower than even old dial-up connections.

However, after landing it will be able to use the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to send images back to Earth. Chen estimates that we’ll be able to see at least some low-res images of the environment around Perseverance on the surface shortly after landing. We may have to wait a few days for more imagery and audio that paint the full picture of the landing process.

We will, however, have live feeds from mission control, which provided some of the more iconic images from the Curiosity landing. (Mohawk guy, anyone?) Of course, COVID-19 protocols will be in effect at mission control, but it’s unlikely that even the pandemic will dampen the celebration of a successful landing.

“I don’t think that Covid is going to be able to stop us from jumping up and down and fist bumping,” said Deputy Project Manager Matt Wallace. “You’re going to see a lot of happy people no matter what, once we get this thing on the surface safely.”

Follow CNET’s 2021 Space Calendar to stay up to date with all the latest space news this year. You can even add it to your own Google Calendar. 

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Science

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover landing will be must-see TV

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An illustration of Perseverance during its descent to the Martian surface.


NASA

NASA is just weeks away from landing a shiny new robot on the surface of Mars, and for the first time, we’ll be able to see and hear what it’s like to touch down on another world.

Perseverance is due to land in Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, the first artificial object to land on the surface since the Mars Insight lander in 2018 and the first rover since Curiosity touched down in 2012.

But the new rover on the block is carrying more audio-visual gear than its predecessors to capture portions of the pivotal entry, descent and landing, or EDL, phase of the mission. A camera mounted on the back shell of the spacecraft is pointed up and will be able to catch a view of the parachutes that will deploy during descent to slow Perseverance as it comes in for its landing. Beneath this is a downward-pointing camera on the descent stage, which further slows and orients the rover for landing. 

Finally, the rover itself is equipped with cameras and a microphone. Altogether, this suite of tech should provide us with the most detailed images and audio of a landing on Mars yet.

“We’re going to be able to watch ourselves land for the first time on another planet,” Lori Glaze, who heads the Planetary Science Division of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, told reporters during a briefing Wednesday.

Perseverance carries its own audio-visual rigging.


NASA

The entire EDL phase will last only about seven minutes, but EDL lead Allen Chen calls it “the most critical and most dangerous part of the mission.”

Perseverance will hit the Martian atmosphere traveling at almost 12,000 miles per hour  (19,312 kilometers per hour), streaking across the sky as it begins to slow down. A 70-foot (21 meters) diameter parachute will deploy to slow it further. Afterward, its heat shield is released and radar is activated to help it determine its own location. 

At an altitude of about one mile (1.5 kilometers), the descent module fires its engines and a new terrain relative navigation system, or TRN, kicks in to identify a safe landing spot. TRN is basically a sort of computer vision that allows the spacecraft to look at the terrain below and match it up with maps in its database.


Now playing:
Watch this:

This is how NASA’s Perseverance rover will get Mars rocks…



2:06

The system slows down to a literal crawl, and then it’s time for “sky crane,” the same sort of hovering landing system the Curiosity rover used, which will allow Perseverance to basically lower itself softly to the surface.

This whole process will be fully automated without any input from mission control because of the delay in sending radio signals back and forth from Mars to the Earth.

Perseverance carries a number of science instruments to help look for signs of ancient life on our neighboring world, to collect samples that will be returned to Earth and to test some technologies for future Mars missions.

Also, it has a tiny helicopter.

Robots have spent years rolling around Mars, which is pretty cool, but for the first time NASA will use a small helicopter, dubbed Ingenuity, to try flying around the planet.


Now playing:
Watch this:

How NASA’s Mars helicopter could change the future of…



5:20

But before Ingenuity can fly, Perseverance has to nail its landing first. While its cameras and microphones will capture much of this whole process, there won’t be a live feed like we’ve become accustomed to from the International Space Station or most launches from Earth. That’s because the data relay Perseverance will be using during EDL is slower than even old dial-up connections.

However, after landing it will be able to use the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to send images back to Earth. Chen estimates that we’ll be able to see at least some low-res images of the environment around Perseverance on the surface shortly after landing. We may have to wait a few days for more imagery and audio that paint the full picture of the landing process.

We will, however, have live feeds from mission control, which provided some of the more iconic images from the Curiosity landing. (Mohawk guy, anyone?) Of course, COVID-19 protocols will be in effect at mission control, but it’s unlikely that even the pandemic will dampen the celebration of a successful landing.

“I don’t think that Covid is going to be able to stop us from jumping up and down and fist bumping,” said Deputy Project Manager Matt Wallace. “You’re going to see a lot of happy people no matter what, once we get this thing on the surface safely.”

Follow CNET’s 2021 Space Calendar to stay up to date with all the latest space news this year. You can even add it to your own Google Calendar. 

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Science

Mars rover landing: Perseverance will begin ‘epic journey’ on Mars next month

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The rover, which is the largest and most advanced rover NASA has ever built, will act as a robotic geologist, collecting samples of dirt and rocks that will eventually be returned to Earth by the 2030s.

For that reason, Perseverance is also the cleanest machine ever sent to Mars, designed so it doesn’t contaminate the Martian samples with any microbes from Earth, providing a false reading.

The mission teams have made many modifications due to the pandemic, but they have adapted to work safely and effectively. The team that will be at JPL during the landing conducted an adapted simulation of the landing that transpired last week over three days.

“Don’t let anybody tell you different — landing on Mars is hard to do,” said John McNamee, project manager for the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission at JPL, in a statement. “But the women and men on this team are the best in the world at what they do. When our spacecraft hits the top of the Mars atmosphere at about three-and-a-half miles per second, we’ll be ready.”

Perseverance is the latest step in NASA’s long history of exploring the red planet. It builds on lessons learned from previous missions with new goals that will shed more light on the history of Mars.

“NASA has been exploring Mars since Mariner 4 performed a flyby in July of 1965, with two more flybys, seven successful orbiters, and eight landers since then,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, in a statement.

“Perseverance, which was built from the collective knowledge gleaned from such trailblazers, has the opportunity to not only expand our knowledge of the Red Planet, but to investigate one of the most important and exciting questions of humanity about the origin of life both on Earth and also on other planets.”

The spacecraft, launched in July, only has about 25.6 million miles left of its 292.5 million-mile adventure from Earth to Mars. And once it arrives at Mars, the rover’s journey to the planet’s surface starts with a bang.

The teams at NASA call it the “seven minutes of terror.”

And just weeks after the landing, video cameras and microphones on the spacecraft will show the rover’s perspective of this harrowing experience.

‘Seven minutes of terror’

The one-way light time it takes for radio signals to travel from Earth to Mars is about 10.5 minutes, which means the seven minutes it takes for the spacecraft to land on Mars will occur without any help or intervention from NASA teams on Earth.

This is the “seven minutes of terror.” The ground teams tell the spacecraft when to begin EDL (entry, descent and landing) and the spacecraft takes over from there.

It is no exaggeration to say that this is the most critical and dangerous part of the mission, according to Allen Chen, Mars 2020 entry, descent, and landing lead at JPL.

“It is not guaranteed that we will be successful,” Zurbuchen acknowledged. The mission teams, however, have done everything they can to prepare for a successful landing.

This rover is the heaviest that NASA has ever attempted to land, weighing in at over a metric ton.

The spacecraft hits the top of the Martian atmosphere moving at 12,000 miles per hour and has to slow down to zero miles per hour seven minutes later when the rover softly lands on the surface.

It will streak across the Martian sky like a meteor, Chen said.

About 10 minutes before entering the thin Martian atmosphere, the cruise stage that has carried the spacecraft on its journey through space is shed and the rover prepares for a guided entry, where small thrusters on the aeroshell help adjust its angle.

The spacecraft’s heat shield will endure peak heating of 2,370 degrees Fahrenheit, 75 seconds after entering the atmosphere.

Perseverance is targeting a 28-mile-wide ancient lake bed and river delta, the most challenging site yet for a NASA spacecraft landing on Mars. Rather than being flat and smooth, the small landing site is littered with sand dunes, steep cliffs, boulders and small craters.

The spacecraft has two upgrades — called Range Trigger and Terrain-Relative Navigation — to navigate this difficult and hazardous site.

Range Trigger will tell the 70.5-foot-wide parachute when to deploy based on the spacecraft’s position 240 seconds after entering the atmosphere. After the parachute deploys, the heat shield will detach.

The rover’s Terrain-Relative Navigation acts like a second brain, using cameras to take pictures of the ground as it rapidly approaches and determines the safest spot to land. It can shift the landing spot by up to 2,000 feet, according to NASA.

The back shell and parachute separate after the heat shield is discarded when the spacecraft is 1.3 miles above the Martian surface. The Mars landing engines, which include eight retrorockets, will fire to slow the descent from 190 miles per hour to about 1.7 miles per hour.

Then, the famed sky crane maneuver that landed the Curiosity rover will occur. Nylon cords will lower the rover 25 feet below the descent stage. After the rover touches down on the Martian surface, the cords will detach and the descent stage will fly away and land at a safe distance.

On the surface of Mars

Once the rover has landed, Perseverance’s two-year mission will begin, and it will go through a “checkout” period to make sure it’s ready.

The rover will also find a nice, flat surface to drop the Ingenuity helicopter so it has a place to use as a helipad for its potential five test flights during a 30-day period. This will occur within the first 50 to 90 sols, or Martian days, of the mission.

Once Ingenuity is settled on the surface, Perseverance will drive to a safe spot at a distance and use its cameras to watch Ingenuity’s flight.

This will be the first flight of a helicopter on another planet.

After those flights, Perseverance will begin searching for evidence of ancient life, study Mars’ climate and geology and collect samples that will eventually be returned to Earth via planned future missions. It will drive three times faster than previous rovers.

Jezero Crater was chosen as Perseverance’s home because billions of years ago, the basin was the site of a lake and river delta. Rocks and dirt from this basin could provide fossilized evidence of past microbial life, as well as more information about what ancient Mars was like.

“Perseverance’s sophisticated science instruments will not only help in the hunt for fossilized microbial life, but also expand our knowledge of Martian geology and its past, present, and future,” said Ken Farley, project scientist for Mars 2020, in a statement.

“Our science team has been busy planning how best to work with what we anticipate will be a firehose of cutting-edge data. That’s the kind of ‘problem’ we are looking forward to.”

The path Perseverance will traverse is about 15 miles long, an “epic journey” that will take years, Farley said. What scientists could discover about Mars, though, is worth the journey.

Perseverance also carries instruments that could help further exploration on Mars in the future, like MOXIE, the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment. This experiment, about the size of a car battery, will attempt to convert Martian carbon dioxide into oxygen.

Not only could this help NASA scientists learn how to produce rocket fuel on Mars, but also oxygen that could be use during future human exploration of the red planet.

“The mission provides hope and unity,” Zurbuchen said. “As our cosmic neighbor, Mars continues to captivate our imagination.”

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