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'Perseverance': Successfully Landing the Greatest Mars Mission in History

2021-02-18T21:16:14.096Z


NASA poses on the surface of the red planet a last generation vehicle to find traces of life Illustration of 'Perseverance' on the surface of Mars.NASA The largest mission to Mars in history has successfully landed on the red planet. The Perseverance exploration vehicle - a prodigy of the one-ton technique developed by the United States together with other European countries, including Spain - landed this Thursday in the Jezero crater at the edge of ten at night, peninsular time. Now beg


Illustration of 'Perseverance' on the surface of Mars.NASA

The largest mission to Mars in history has successfully landed on the red planet.

The

Perseverance

exploration vehicle

- a prodigy of the one-ton technique developed by the United States together with other European countries, including Spain - landed this Thursday in the Jezero crater at the edge of ten at night, peninsular time.

Now begins NASA's most ambitious mission to date with the goal of finding traces of past life.

"

Perseverance

is alive on the surface of Mars," was heard at NASA's control center shortly after landing, to applause from the mission team.

If this trip had happened 3,500 million years ago,

Perseverance

would be in the middle of a large lake 45 kilometers in diameter fed by a river that carries sediment, as this is what the Jezero crater is thought to be at that time.

Mars was then a blue planet like Earth and it is known that in this frozen twin of our planet the basic conditions were given for life to emerge.

It was precisely in that era that the first living beings began to emerge on our planet: microbes that probably inhabited lakes, rivers or seas.

But millions of years ago the red planet began to lose its atmosphere, its balance was broken and it took a deadly turn until it became the frozen desert that it is today.

The vehicle

The scanner has six wheels and is equipped with seven scientific instruments with which to try to analyze the atomic and chemical composition of the bottom of the disappeared lake in search of unmistakable traces of Martian microbes.

"

Perseverance

[perseverance in English] is the most ambitious Martian exploration vehicle that NASA has launched," explained Thomas Zurbuchen, chief of science at the US space agency. The destination for this mission is "the most complicated in which it has been tried to land to date ”, highlighted the scientist.

NASA has always liked to force the drama of landing any type of spacecraft on Mars.

Since the beginning of space exploration in the 1950s, one in every two missions to the red planet has failed.

But the US has a history of success that is unmatched in the world: it has successfully landed four mobile rovers on Mars.

This

rover

will be the heaviest, most complex and expensive: about 2,200 million euros.

The decisive part of the landing happened today, with the entry of the spacecraft into the thin atmosphere of Mars, which is 100 times less dense than that of Earth.

This means that the friction of the air slows down much less the breakneck speed of entry, of about 20,000 kilometers per hour.

The retrorockets, the huge parachute and a crane have made the

rover

come to a halt at the speed of a person walking.

NASA has broadcast live - with an 11-minute delay due to the distance - the entire landing.

The most exciting was the "seven minutes of terror" before landing.

As we continue toward the goal of getting humans to Mars, a comprehensive map of near-surface water ice on the planet has come out 🧊.

This will help future astronauts survive on the Red Planet and use water ice for other purposes, such as in rocket fuel.

https://t.co/wDETd8OuwS pic.twitter.com/G4wakySbOk

- NASA JPL (@NASAJPL) February 8, 2021

One minute after entering the atmosphere, the spacecraft reached its peak temperature due to the friction of the air: 1,300 degrees, which had to withstand its heat shield.

Following the deployment of the parachute, nearly 22 meters in diameter, as a seven-story building, and its subsequent unhooking, a completely new device came into play: the TRN.

It is an artificial intelligence system that takes pictures of the ground and "thinks" about the most suitable place to land.

At 21 meters from the ground, a crane unfolded chains of about seven meters long from which the valuable car was hung

The entire landing sequence is automatic.

Those responsible for mission control have been unable to do anything to correct the trajectory or fix problems.

The United States has become the only country to have landed five consecutive rovers on Mars;

a milestone that will put it ahead of China, its main competitor, which in a few weeks will try to reach Mars with an orbiter, a lander and a mobile vehicle, all the first time, something that has never been done before.

The landing of

Perseverance

has been documented like no other mission.

The ship carries cameras that recorded the arrival to the red planet and also microphones that record the sound of the planet.

It will take a little over a month for the scientific and technical team to verify that all

Perseverance

systems are

working properly before starting the operations phase.

On this occasion, NASA has equipped its vehicle with a fast-moving mode that will allow it to cover much more distance in a short time.

One of the main targets within the Jezero crater will be the old delta that formed the river that emptied into the great lagoon.

The official mission will last a little less than two years, although it will probably be much longer.

If all goes well, those in charge of the mission want to visit the area of ​​the crater through which the old river entered and, later, go to the other area of ​​the hole through which the waters flowed.

They are the most interesting places where there may still be organic molecules or minerals that could prove that there was life on Mars.

"We believe that the best places to look for life markers in Jezero will be the bottom of the lake or the shores, where there could be carbonate minerals, which tend to preserve certain fossils very well", explains Ken Williford, one of the scientists of the mission, in a press release from NASA.

"But we must remember that we are looking for primitive microbes in an alien world," he says.

Perseverance

will pave the way for a more ambitious future goal: to bring earth and rocks from Mars for the first time.

The car is equipped with a system to select the most interesting samples, seal them in a metal container and leave them on the surface.

In the future, other missions would come to collect them.

The reason is simple: no matter how advanced the instruments on board this car are, proving beyond all doubt that fossils or traces of life have been found is a task that can only be done on Earth.

"As Carl Sagan [famous American scientist creator of the

Cosmos

series

] said, if we see a porcupine looking at the camera we will know that there is life on Mars and there probably was in the past," explains Gentry Lee, engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory from NASA.

“But based on previous experiences, this is extremely unlikely.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof and discovering that there was life somewhere beyond Earth would certainly be extraordinary, "he concludes.

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Source: elparis

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