'Touchdown Confirmed': NASA's Perseverance Rover Successfully Lands On Mars

Racing through space at more than 12,000 mph, NASA's Perseverance Mars rover reached Mars Thursday and pulled off a thrilling seven-minute plunge through the atmosphere to land on the surface of the red planet. Its mission is to look for evidence of past microbial life in the rocky remnants of an ancient lake.

"Touchdown confirmed!" mission controllers announced at 3:57 p.m. EST.

Elated, if socially distanced, flight engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, burst into cheers and applause as telemetry came in confirming touchdown.

Their relief was understandable. Frequently described as "seven minutes of terror," the rover's descent was a nail-biting sequence of computer-orchestrated make-or-break events that had to work in near flawless fashion to get the 2,260-pound rover safely to the surface.

The $2.4 billion rover hit the top of the discernible Martian atmosphere at 3:48 p.m. EST and quickly decelerated in a blaze of atmospheric friction, its protective heat shield enduring temperatures as high as 2,700 degrees — hot enough to melt stainless steel.

Slowing to just below 1,000 mph, it deployed a giant 70.5-foot-wide parachute in the supersonic slipstream and used an advanced guidance system to identify hazards and pick out a safe landing spot on the floor of Jezero Crater.

Then, less than a minute from touchdown, at a (predicted) altitude of about 2.1 miles, Perseverance fell free of its parachute while still descending at about 200 mph. Seconds later, eight engines in a rocket-powered backpack fired up, slowing the craft to less than 2 mph by the time it reached an expected altitude of just 70 feet or so.

At that point, Perseverance was lowered toward the surface suspended by tethers while the jet pack continued the descent. Finally, the rover's six wheels settled to the surface, the tethers were cut and the "sky crane" backpack flew off to crash a safe distance away.

Earth dropped below the horizon as viewed from Jezero Crater about a minute before touchdown, cutting off direct-to-Earth X-band radio signals from Perseverance. But UHF signals confirming the landing were relayed to JPL by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which was passing overhead.

The rover's automated descent appeared to go flawlessly as its flight computer used multiple cameras, radar and other sensors to figure out exactly where it was in relation to the planned landing target. The rover then adjusted its course as required to avoid possible missions-ending hazards.

Perseverance had to pull off the landing on its own because radio signals, moving at 186,000 miles per second, needed more than 11 minutes to cross the 127-million-mile gulf between Earth and Mars. Flight engineers at JPL could only sit and wait, watching data trickle in 11 minutes after the fact.

And to their relief, seven months after launch from Cape Canaveral and an interplanetary cruise covering 293 million miles, NASA's fifth Mars rover, the first designed specifically to look for signs of past life, was safely on the surface of the red planet.

Jezero Crater was targeted because it once held a 28-mile-wide body of water the size of Lake Tahoe. The ancient lake was fed by a river that cut through the rim of the crater, depositing sediments in a fan-like delta clearly visible from orbit.

Perseverance targeted a landing on the floor of the lakebed just beyond the delta, but it's not yet known exactly where the rover came down within its predicted 4.8-by-4.1 mile landing footprint.

Assuming no major problems, 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 named Ingenuity that will attempt the first powered flight in the thin air of Mars, a "Wright brothers' moment" on another world.

Another experiment will test the feasibility of extracting oxygen from the Martian atmosphere, technology that could someday help future astronauts produce their own air and rocket fuel.

Looking for signs of past life

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.

NASA plans to send another rover to Jezero later this decade to collect the samples, load them into a small rocket and blast them into Mars orbit where a European Space Agency spacecraft will capture and return them to Earth for laboratory analysis.

But first, Perseverance has to safely land.

"That is always a challenging feat for us, this is one of the most difficult maneuvers that we do in the space business," Wallace said. "Almost 50% of the spacecraft that have been sent to the surface of Mars failed. And so we know we have our work cut out for us tomorrow to get down to the surface safely at Jezero."

First published on February 17, 2021 / 6:10 PM

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