Marcelo bellucci
02/18/2021 5:57 PM
Clarín.com
Society
Updated 02/18/2021 5:57 PM
While the flight controllers - looking at their screens almost without blinking - calculated the necessary maneuvers to overcome the so-called 7 minutes of terror, the Perseverance rover, after removing some layers of the rust from the Martian surface, landed in the Jezero crater at 5:56 p.m. local time, on the western edge of the
Isidis Planitia
plain
.
The module entered the rarefied atmosphere of Mars, at a speed of 20,000 kilometers per hour and in less than 420 seconds, the probe had to decelerate to 2.7 kilometers per hour.
The entire maneuver was wrapped in a glove of temperature that reached 1,300 degrees, added to the conditions of a quite inhospitable world for such a precise operation.
The telemetry of the rover during its descent was transmitted by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), a satellite that flies over Mars and that has been in operation for 16 years.
The MRO is in charge of confirming that the mission was completed successfully and sending the first photos.
The winning ace that Perseverance kept in its metallic structure was the experience card from previous landings.
"No landing on Mars is guaranteed, but we have been preparing for a decade to put the wheels of this rover on the planet's surface," shot Jennifer Trosper, deputy director of mission projects at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). .
For the fifth time in a row - after a trip of 470 million kilometers and almost seven months in duration - NASA deposited a new reconnaissance laboratory on the soil of Mars.
Unlike the four rovers that preceded it - Sojourner (1997), Spirit and Opportunity (2004) and Curiosity (2012) - which were mere terrain explorers, Perseverance is a true six-wheeled, three-meter-long research laboratory. .
NASA's JPL was developed.
And while the statistics were in favor of this mission, since of the 14 landing attempts on the planet, eight have been successful, all of them with the American seal.
In fact, NASA only got it wrong once, in 1999.
Perseverance is NASA's fifth rover to put its wheels on Mars.
Its scientific load is made up of seven main instruments.
Some are an update to what Curiosity had, such as the Mastcam-Z camera pair, the ChemCam laser, and the REMS instrument.
Inside, engraved on three silicon chips, Perseverance bears the names of nearly 11 million people.
In addition, you can share what you capture through 23 cameras, including video and two microphones.
In addition, it will extract about 30 Martian rock and sand samples that will be stored in titanium tubes so that, in a mission scheduled for departure in 2026, NASA in collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA) send a module to recover them.
What no scientist took into account when making their equations was the variable of the pandemic.
"It is true that the COVID-19 crisis has forced us to work differently than we were used to, but the team has made an enormous effort to reach the goal," said Matt Wallace, Deputy Director of Perseverance projects at the JPL.
The peak experiment of the mission will consist of piloting a mini-helicopter called Ingenuity.
It will drop to the ground below the robot in the weeks after landing and will need to perform at least five short flights.
It was described as a "Wright brothers" moment in another world.
Despite the red planet's thin atmosphere, engineers hope that Ingenuity's 4-foot rotors, which spin five times faster than the blades of a helicopter on Earth, along with low Martian gravity, will help lift it off.
"If the small spacecraft encounters difficulties, the scientific collection of the Mars 2020 mission will not be affected. If the helicopter takes off as designed, future missions to Mars could enlist second-generation helicopters to add an aerial dimension to their explorations."
A point on the map
Scientists on the Mars 2020 mission targeted the Jezero crater, named after a city in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
In some Slavic languages, the word "jezero" means "lake".
The presumption of scientists is that this geographic point was a basin that emptied into a lake and deposited fan-shaped sediments, like the deltas that form on Earth.
Jezero shows multiple types of rocks, including clays and carbonates, that have the potential to preserve the type of organic molecules that would hint at the past existence of life.
And while the water disappeared 3.5 billion years ago, on some ridge within this 45-kilometer-wide crater, or perhaps along its 610-meter-high rim, there are biosignatures - evidence that life once developed on the planet.