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On Thursday night, the US space agency NASA landed a new rover, Perseverance, on Mars. The rover’s main task will be to search for traces of bacterial life on the Red Planet. Scientists are sure that if there was once life on Mars, it falls from 3 to 4 billion years ago when there was still water on the planet. Perseverance is the third spacecraft to arrive on Mars in the past month: earlier robots from the UAE and China entered its orbit. All three missions left the Earth in July 2020.
“This is amazing,” said the acting director. NASA chief Steve Yurczyk. The dispatch of the device took place in challenging conditions due to the pandemic and related precautions, he said, which only increases the joy of success.
Perseverance will serve as a scout for future rovers, Yurczyk said: the experience of a successful landing simplifies the task for the next missions.
Landing on Mars was a daunting task. Unlike the Moon, it has an atmosphere, which makes landing very difficult: only about 40% of such missions succeed.
The Atlas-5 launch vehicle with the American Perseverance (Perseverance or Perseverance) rover launched from the Cape Canaveral launch site in the United States on July 30, 2020. In six months, the spacecraft covered the distance from Earth to Mars of almost 500 million kilometers.
Before landing, Perseverance experienced “seven minutes of horror” – the time of transition from the upper atmosphere to the surface of the Red Planet. To do this, he dropped the speed from the second space (for Mars, it is about 20 thousand km / h) to the speed of a pedestrian. The rover is located at a distance of hundreds of millions of kilometers from us, which means that the signals transmitted by it reach the Earth with an almost 10-minute delay. If something went wrong at some point, it would be physically impossible to adjust the landing trajectory quickly.
The Jezero crater’s satellite images, where the device landed, indicate that the now dried-up river once flowed into a vast lake there.
It is one of the best-preserved Martian deltas, where rivers have formed sediment layers from brought in rock debris, sand, and possibly organic hydrocarbons.