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Touch down! NASA’s Mars landing sparks new era of exploration
Having stuck its nail-biting landing, the Perseverance rover will now collect
rocks to return to Earth and record Mars sounds for the first time.
...
Exploring the terrain
Perseverance’s arrival was even more of a nail-biter than other Mars landings,
because the rover touched down in a geologically challenging spot. Jezero is
full of steep cliffs, large boulders and treacherous sand dunes that the
spacecraft needed to miss. Engineers at the JPL, which was where Perseverance
was built, developed hazard-avoidance techniques to ensure a safe touchdown. Mos
t notably, as Perseverance descended towards Jezero, it used a downward-pointing
camera to quickly photograph the landscape and compare the terrain with a set of
maps stored onboard. The spacecraft then steered itself away from hazards,
coming to rest on a flat spot in one of the few safe areas. "Everything looks
great," says Trosper.
The last rover to reach Mars was NASA’s Curiosity, in 2012. It has been
exploring an ancient lake bed in Gale Crater, where it has discovered evidence
for a once-habitable environment (although it found no actual evidence of past
life on Mars).
Perseverance carries two microphones — the first ever sent to the planet — to
listen to Martian sounds, such as wind and the crunch of rover wheels rolling
across the surface. In 2018, NASA landed another craft, the InSight probe, some
3,500 kilometres away, but it has a seismometer that instead listens for ‘marsquakes’
shaking the ground. InSight scientists think there is a small chance that the
probe could ‘hear’ Perseverance land on Mars, when two large parts of the
rover’s landing system hit the surface. But they won’t know whether InSight
detected the impact until the morning of 19 February, at the earliest. It would
be the first seismic detection of a known impact on another planet and could
reveal more information about the Martian interior, because waves such as these
can help to map geological features below the surface. “All we can do is wait
and hope,” says Benjamin Fernando, a planetary scientist at the University of
Oxford, UK, who is involved in the effort.
Images from Perseverance's colour cameras, as well as video taken during its
descent, are likely to be released in the coming days as well.
During its first 30 Martian days on the surface, the rover will be busy with
checking out its instruments, including unfolding a mast laden with
high-definition cameras and photographing the area around the landing site. One
instrument will pull in some of the Martian atmosphere and attempt to use the
gases it collects to make a few grams of oxygen, as a resource for future human
explorers.
In the coming weeks, Perseverance will roll away from its landing site and lower
a tiny, 1.8-kilogram helicopter from its belly onto the surface. The helicopter,
named Ingenuity, will test the first powered flight on another world. “It will
truly be a Wright Brothers moment, but on another planet,” says MiMi Aung, the
helicopter’s lead engineer at the JPL.
Mission efficiency
During Perseverance’s first 3 months on the surface, team scientists and
engineers will be working on Mars time, in which a day is nearly 40 minutes
longer than an Earth day. That means they will often work through the night,
their lives pushed into a sort of permanent jetlag. Working on Mars time,
though, allows the team to be more efficient in planning daily operations, after
they’ve checked in with the rover at the start of each Martian day.
Perseverance aims to travel quickly and efficiently, journeying at least 15
kilometres across Jezero in one Mars year (which is nearly 2 years on Earth) —
the time NASA allotted for the initial mission. It carries 43 tubes for
collecting Martian rock and dirt; the goal is to fill and lay down 15 to 20 of
them by the end of that first year for future spacecraft to pick up.
Mission efficiency
During Perseverance’s first 3 months on the surface, team scientists and
engineers will be working on Mars time, in which a day is nearly 40 minutes
longer than an Earth day. That means they will often work through the night,
their lives pushed into a sort of permanent jetlag. Working on Mars time,
though, allows the team to be more efficient in planning daily operations, after
they’ve checked in with the rover at the start of each Martian day.
The plutonium-powered rover could then roll onto a neighbouring plain to explore
other environments that were suitable for ancient life and continue collecting
rocks and soil. The earliest any of its samples could be returned to Earth is
2031.
Perseverance, which launched in July 2020, cost US$2.4 billion to build and
launch and will cost another $300 million to land and operate during its first
year on Mars. It is the third mission to reach the red planet this month —
following spacecraft from the United Arab Emirates and China, which are both now
in orbit.
The Chinese mission, Tianwen-1, will try to land its own rover on the surface as
early as May.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00432-1