Forget your thriller movie binge this week. NASA has seven minutes of terror in store for Thursday. Okay that famed naming might sound super scary but it is well deserved. No, there won’t be any jump scares, but landing on Mars is a real nail biter. So far the United States is the ONLY country able to successfully land there and about half the time they have crashed. The most recent Martian crash was the unfortunate Schiaparelli lander by ESA just a few years ago. What makes Mars such a pain? Well, it has to do with the Planet’s very thin atmosphere (1% of Earth’s). There is enough of it there that it will burn up an object on entry so you have to worry about heating but not enough of it to really slow the rover/lander (AND NOW HELICOPTER) down so you will need a powered descent. This all has to be done autonomously (or preprogrammed without human help) because it takes 10.5 minutes to send/receive communication from Mars. So all of us will just have to wait on the edge of our seats: you don’t want to miss it!
Perseverance (also lovingly nicknamed Percy) will land on Mars this Thursday, 2/18. Mars is one of our best shots at finding life in our solar system making it to the top of the list for planetary exploration (decided on by a bunch of scientists every 10 years). Perseverance will be hunting for life like no other rover has done before and collecting samples to be eventually returned to Earth. You may have noticed I alluded to this earlier but besides Percy there is another cool craft on this descent, A HELICOPTER named Ingenuity! If this spacecraft succeeds it will be the first powered flight on another planet.
You can watch the event on NASA TV (also available on any of these apps (YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitch, Daily Motion, Theta.TV, and NASA App) starting at 2:15 pm EST (19:15 UTC).
Si hablas Español (y prefieres escuchar en Español), no te preocupes. NASA tambien tiene una programa en Español aquí.
The last thing I will say before I get to the details on what to expect is NASA also has a stream with zero commentary. So if you would just like to listen in on the control room with no explanation of what the events are, you can do that here.
Also, I feel like I have been very doom and gloom in this post. Although landing on Mars is VERY risky, Perseverance is employing the same landing strategy as its successful predecessor, Curiosity. So I feel pretty good about what will happen on Thursday and you should too.
Okay! So the exact moments everything goes down….
NASA has this nice infographic of what is happening during the entry starting with the cruise separation but it is with respect to the time of landing so I will also walk you through it with the expected time of the events.
Cruise Stage Separation – 3:38 pm EST (20:38 UTC) Percy says goodbye to its interplanetary ride
Atmospheric Entry – 3:48 pm EST (20:48 UTC) this is the official start of those seven minutes of terror
Peak Heating – 3:49 pm EST (20:49 UTC) really testing that heat shield
Parachute Deploy – 3:52 pm EST (20:52 UTC) let’s use that little bit of atmosphere we have
Heat shield separation – 3:52 pm EST (20:52 UTC) hopefully Percy has slowed down enough and does not need that anymore and can finish up its descent
Radar Lock – 3:52 pm EST (20:52 UTC) with that heat shield out of the way Percy will figure out exactly how far it is from the surface
Terrain Relative Navigation – 3:53 pm EST (20:53 UTC)… this is exactly what is sounds like
Backshell Separation – 3:54 pm EST (20:54 UTC) bye chutes! the crane and its jets will take it from here
Touchdown! – 3:55 pm EST (20:55 UTC) the rover will land on Jezero Crater and the crane will get out of the way and land elsewhere as to not disturb the rover
That is it! Hopefully in just a couple days we will all be breathing a sigh of relief.
Happy Exploring!
(p.s. you can go to Mars virtually in Mars photo booth)
