A chart showing highlights of the Perseverance rover's entry, descent and landing on Mars.Įngineers plan to spend about 90 days checking out the rover's complex instruments and systems. Perseverance is targeting a landing on the floor of the lakebed just beyond the delta. 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. 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? Hence the familiar references to "seven minutes of terror." Looking for signs of past life Jezero Crater offers one of the best places on Mars to look for signs of past microbial life - but it's also the most challenging landing spot NASA has ever attempted to reach on Mars.Īnd it will all be over, one way or the other, in just seven minutes, well before flight engineers receive signals confirming the start of atmospheric entry. From atmospheric entry to touchdown in Jezero Crater will take about seven minutes, ending with the rover being lowered to the surface by a rocket-powered "sky crane" backpack.īecause of the 127-million-mile gulf between Earth and Mars, it will take radio signals, relayed through NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, 11 minutes to reach anxious flight engineers at JPL.Īs a result, the success or failure of the rover's seven-minute descent will depend entirely on its ability to figure out exactly where it is in relation to its landing target and autonomously adjust its course as required to avoid steep cliffs, boulders, sand dunes and other mission-ending hazards. So we have perhaps a little bit more confidence that this is going to work."ĭropping away from the parachute and backshell one minute before touchdown, the rover's rocket-powered "sky crane" descent vehicle will swoop to an altitude of just 70 feet or so, lowering Perseverance to the floor of Jezero Crater on quick-release tethers. we actually did high-altitude supersonic testing (on Earth) this time as part of this project.
"It's a very big parachute, the size of a Little League infield and it snaps open in about point-six seconds while going almost Mach 2 (twice the speed of sound)." "There's a lot of concentrated risk in that supersonic parachute opening," said Allen Chen, the engineer in charge of the rover's entry, descent and landing.
Hitting the thin, mostly carbon dioxide "air" at a blistering 12,000 mph, the spacecraft will rapidly decelerate, enduring heat shield temperatures as high as 2,370 degrees as it slows to just under 1,000 mph within about four minutes.Īt that point, at an altitude of about seven miles and a velocity of around 940 mph, a 70.5-foot-wide parachute will unfurl in the supersonic slipstream, slowing the spacecraft to just 200 mph by the time it reaches an altitude of 1.3 miles. Seven months after its launch from Cape Canaveral, the $2.4 billion rover, encased in a flying saucer-like aeroshell and protected by a blunt heat shield, will slam into the top of Mars' discernible atmosphere at 3:48 p.m. The 2,260-pound rover is the largest and most complex spacecraft ever sent to Mars.Īsked Wednesday what the odds might be for a successful landing, deputy project manager Matt Wallace said the sheer complexity of the 2,260-pound rover, the heaviest and most sophisticated ever sent to Mars, makes it difficult to predict. Mission managers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said that the spacecraft was healthy and flawlessly executing its final approach to Jezero Crater as it readied for a high-speed descent that engineers only half jokingly refer to as "seven minutes of terror." NASA's Perseverance Mars rover, seen during testing at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The mission is an unprecedented attempt to find signs of past microbial life at the site of an ancient Martian river, delta and lakebed. NASA's Perseverance Mars rover closed in on the red planet after a journey of 293 million miles, hurtling toward a nail-biting seven-minute descent to touchdown Thursday. Update: Perseverance landed successfully on Thursday - read the latest story here.
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