The Perseverance rover was launched in July 2020 and is expected to land on February 18, 2021 after nearly 470 million kilometers of space travel. Inside the capsule there is also the Ingenuity helicopter-drone that will be the first to fly outside our planet.
This little helicopter will have several challenges to overcome. The worst or most complicated? The rarefied atmosphere of Mars, which barely represents 1% of the density of the Earth.
Although we call it a helicopter, it is more of a minidron: it weighs 1.8 kilograms, its carbon fiber wings are much larger and rotate about five times faster (2,400 revolutions per minute) than would be required to generate the same amount of lift on Earth . However, it will get help from Mars, where gravity is only one-third compared to ours. It comes equipped with two cameras, computers, and navigation sensors. It also has solar cells to recharge its batteries, although much of the energy will be used to keep it warm on cold Martian nights, where temperatures drop to -90 degrees Celsius. Ingenuity will fly at altitudes of 3-5 meters and travel up to 50 meters from its starting area and back. Like Perserverance, it will be too far away to be remotely operated, so it is designed to fly autonomously.
Regarding the rover, the size of a car and the star mission of the US agency in 2020, it will land in the Jezero crater, an ancient delta of the Martian surface with an extension of about 50 kilometers in diameter; an area that in the past could have been covered by rivers and a lake 3.5 billion years ago. Hence, it is a good starting point to find traces of microorganisms that could live there.
The great moment arrives
The program will be broadcast at 20:15 pm peninsular time on the agency’s website and on its social media accounts in Spanish: Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Titled “Together We Persevere” will begin airing before Perseverance’s landing on the Red Planet. The climax will take place at approximately 10:55 p.m. PST, when the Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is expected to make landfall on Martian land.
Entry, descent and landing
The so-called “7 minutes of terror” cited by NASA will represent the development of these three stages of the final phase: entry, descent and landing. Entry into the Martian atmosphere will occur with a deceleration of approximately 20 kilometers per hour to about 3 kilometers per hour upon landing in Jezero crater. The spacecraft will have to reduce its speed from almost 20,000 kilometers per hour to 0 km per hour to land on Mars.
What is the goal of Perseverance?
Perseverance will become the fifth rover of the North American space agency to successfully reach the red planet and its goals are to search for ancient microbial life on the arid and reddish planet, collect rock debris to be sent to Earth, investigate the climate and the characteristics of the terrain. The mission will last one year; a Martian year: 687 Earth days.
Mars is going to be very crowded from now on. Missions from the United Arab Emirates and China have already reached the orbit of Mars to carry out a preliminary reconnaissance and have already sent their first snapshots.
Reference: NASA
