We Have Persevered!

NASA’s astrobiology rover, the most advanced one ever made, streaked through the thin Martian atmosphere and successfully landed at the Jezero Crater, which is a vast ancient-lake basin.

After travelling through space for more than 450 Million Kilometers, success was at the hands of NASA, when on late Thursday (18th Feb), just 5 minutes before midnight (KSA Time), the rover was declared a success.

The woman heading the entry, descend, and landing, Dr. Swati Mohan, announced “Touchdown Confirmed. Perseverance is safely on the surface of Mars.” and the entire Control Room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory burst into applause and expressed extreme joy, which they deserved after 8 years of hard-work.

The spacecraft’s self-guided descent and landing during a complex series of maneuvers that NASA dubbed “the seven minutes of terror” stands as the most elaborate and challenging feat in the journey of a robotic spaceflight.

The landing represented the riskiest part of two-year, $2.7bn endeavor whose primary aim is to search for possible fossilized signs of microbes that may have flourished on Mars some three billion years ago, when the fourth planet from the sun was warmer, wetter and potentially habitable to life.

Scientists hope to find signs of life embedded in samples of ancient sediments that Perseverance is designed to extract from Martian rock for future analysis back on Earth – the first such specimens ever collected by humans from another planet.

About the size of a car, the 2,263-pound (1,026-kilogram) robotic geologist and astrobiologist will undergo several weeks of testing before it begins its investigation of Mars’ Jezero Crater. While the rover will investigate the rock and sediment of Jezero’s ancient lakebed and river delta to characterize the region’s geology and past climate, a fundamental part of its mission is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life.

This is what scientists expect Mars once was.

To that end, the Mars Sample Return campaign, being planned by NASA and ESA (European Space Agency), will allow scientists on Earth to study samples collected by Perseverance to search for definitive signs of past life using instruments too large and complex to send to the Red Planet.

Thursday’s landing came as a triumph for the pandemic-weary United States in the grips of economic dislocation caused by the COVID-19 public health crisis.

“What an amazing team to work through all the adversity and challenges that go with landing a rover on Mars, plus the challenges of COVID,” said acting NASA Administrator Steve Jurczyk.

Search for ancient life

NASA scientists have described Perseverance as the most ambitious of nearly 20 US missions to Mars dating back to the Mariner spacecraft’s 1965 fly-by.

Larger and packed with more instruments than the four Mars rovers preceding it, Perseverance is set to build on previous findings that liquid water once flowed on the Martian surface and that carbon and other minerals altered by water and considered precursors to the evolution of life were present.

Perseverance’s payload also includes demonstration projects that could help pave the way for eventual human exploration of Mars, including a device to convert the carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere into pure oxygen.

The box-shaped tool, the first built to extract a natural resource of direct use to humans from an extraterrestrial environment, could prove invaluable for future human life support on Mars and for producing rocket propellant to fly astronauts home.

Another experimental prototype Perseverance carried is a miniature helicopter designed to test the first powered, controlled flight of an aircraft on another planet. If successful, the 1.8-kg (four-pound) helicopter could lead to low-altitude aerial surveillance of distant worlds, officials said.

The daredevil nature of the rover’s descent to the Martian surface, at a site that NASA described as both tantalizing to scientists and especially hazardous for landing, was a momentous achievement in itself.

The multi-stage spacecraft carrying the rover soared into the top of the Martian atmosphere at nearly 16 times the speed of sound on Earth, angled to produce aerodynamic lift while jet thrusters adjusted its trajectory.

Jarring, supersonic parachute inflation further slowed the descent, giving way to the deployment of a rocket-powered “sky crane” vehicle that flew to a safe landing spot, lowered the rover on tethers, then flew off to crash a safe distance away.

Perseverance’s immediate predecessor, the rover Curiosity, landed in 2012 and remains in operation, as does the stationary lander InSight, which arrived in 2018 to study the deep interior of Mars.

Last week, separate probes launched by the United Arab Emirates and China reached Martian orbit. NASA has three Mars satellites still in orbit, along with two from the European Space Agency.

Do watch the moments before and after the landing was successful, below.