what was the first thing to land on mars
"Touchdown confirmed!": NASA celebrates every bit Perseverance rover lands on Mars
Racing through space at more than 12,000 mph, NASA's Perseverance Mars rover reached Mars on Th and pulled off a thrilling 7-minute plunge through the atmosphere to land on the surface of the ruby planet to look for testify of past microbial life in the remnants of an ancient lake.
"Touchdown confirmed! Perseverance is safely on the surface of Mars, ready to begin seeking the signs of past life!" Swati Mohan, a guidance, navigation and control officer monitoring telemetry at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, called out as the rover touched downwardly. Elated, if socially distanced, flight engineers burst into cheers and applause, anxiety giving way to relief in the joy of the moment.
The relief was understandable. Often described as "vii minutes of terror," the rover'south descent was a nail-bitter sequence of reckoner-orchestrated make-or-break events that had to work in nearly flawless fashion to get the two,260-pound rover safely down on an ancient lakebed in Jezero Crater, avoiding dangerous cliffs, large boulders and sand dunes in the process.
And the $ii.4 billion rover did just that.
"I almost feel like I'thousand in a dream," said Jennifer Trosper, deputy project manager. "Our task is to recall of all the bad things that tin happen and try to avert those, and when all expert things happen, yous feel similar you're dreaming. And I'm happy to feel like I'one thousand dreaming!"
President Biden tweeted: "Congratulations to NASA and everyone whose difficult work made Perseverance's historic landing possible."
The rover hitting the top of the discernible Martian atmosphere at iii:48 p.g. EST and quickly decelerated in a blaze of atmospheric friction, its protective heat shield enduring temperatures as high as 2,700 degrees — hot enough to melt stainless steel — and a braking force of 10 times the force of gravity on Globe.
Slowing to just beneath 1,000 mph, it deployed a giant 70.v-foot-broad parachute in the supersonic slipstream and used an advanced guidance organisation to place hazards and pick out a safe landing spot on the flooring of Jezero Crater.
And then, less than a minute from touchdown, at an altitude of about 2.i miles, Perseverance savage costless of its parachute while still descending at about 200 mph. Seconds later, eight engines in a rocket-powered backpack fired up, slowing the arts and crafts to less than 2 mph past the time it reached an expected distance of just 70 feet or so.
At that indicate, Perseverance was lowered toward the surface suspended by tethers while the jet pack continued the descent. At three:55 p.one thousand., the rover's six wheels settled to the surface, the tethers were cut and the "sky crane" haversack flew off to crash a safe altitude away.
"Hello, world," Perseverance "tweeted" a few minutes after landing, posting the rover's first prototype of its landing site. "My first await at my forever abode."
Earth dropped below the horizon every bit viewed from Jezero Crater most a minute before touchdown, cut off straight-to-Earth X-band radio signals from Perseverance. But UHF signals confirming the landing were relayed to JPL by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which was passing overhead.
"Heaven crane maneuver has started. about 20 meters to a higher place the surface," Mohan reported as the rover's descent neared its conclusion.
"We're yet getting signals from MRO," an engineer reported
"Touchdown confirmed! " Mohan called a moment after.
A few moments later, the first image from one of the rover'south run a risk cameras came in, showing a relatively apartment surface with no big boulders or other obstacles in view. "Yeah! Whoo Hoo!" an engineer exclaimed as the photo flashed upwards on command room displays.
The rover's automated descent appeared to go flawlessly as its flying reckoner used multiple cameras, radar and other sensors to figure out exactly where information technology was in relation to the planned landing target. The rover and so adjusted its form as required to avoid possible missions-ending hazards.
Perseverance had to pull off the landing on its own because radio signals, moving at 186,000 miles per second, needed more eleven minutes to cross the 127-million-mile gulf between Earth and Mars. Flight engineers at JPL could simply sit and expect, watching data trickle in xi minutes later on the fact.
And to their relief, seven months afterward launch from Cape Canaveral and an interplanetary cruise covering 293 million miles, NASA's fifth Mars rover, the commencement designed specifically to expect for signs of past life, was safely on the surface of the red planet.
Jezero Crater was targeted because it one time held a 28-mile-wide torso of water the size of Lake Tahoe. The aboriginal lake was fed by a river that cutting through the rim of the crater, depositing sediments in a fan-similar delta clearly visible from orbit. The rover landed about one.2 miles to the southeast of the delta, near the middle of its predicted iv.viii-by-4.1 mile landing footprint.
"We think we're facing southeast based on the shadows, near 140 degrees," Trosper said. "The tilt is flat, it's most 1.2 degrees. The the ability arrangement looks good ... everything looks smashing."
A robot geologist on Mars
Assuming no major problems develop, engineers plan to spend about 90 days checking out the rover'due south complex instruments and systems.
During the first month, they also plan to deploy and test a small 4.5-pound, $80 million helicopter named Ingenuity that will attempt the first powered flight in the sparse air of Mars, a "Wright brothers' moment" on some other world.
Another experiment will test the feasibility of extracting oxygen from the Martian temper, technology that could someday aid futurity astronauts produce their own air and rocket fuel.
But the primary goal of the mission is to look for signs of past biological activity.
Equipped with a robot arm, a core-sampling drill and a suite of sophisticated cameras, rock-vaporizing lasers and other instruments, Perseverance will study lakebed deposits, venture across the delta and eventually brand its away up to the ancient lake's shoreline, collecting promising samples forth the way.
Selected rocks and soil volition be placed in a complex internal carousel mechanism that will autonomously photograph, analyze and load them in lipstick-size airtight tubes. The rover will then deposit, or cache, the sealed samples on the surface of Mars to await pickup.
NASA and the European Space Agency plan to transport another rover to Jezero later this decade to collect the samples, load them into a small rocket and blast them into Mars orbit where all the same another spacecraft will snag them for the return flight to World.
William Harwood
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Source: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mars-landing-nasa-perseverance-rover-touchdown/
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