NASA rover streaks toward a landing on Mars
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A NASA rover streaked toward a landing on Mars on Thursday within the riskiest step but in an epic quest to deliver again rocks that might reply whether or not life ever existed on the pink planet.
Ground controllers on the house company’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, settled in nervously for the descent of Perseverance to the floor of Mars, lengthy a deathtrap for incoming spacecraft. It takes a nail-biting 11 1/2 minutes for a sign that may affirm success to achieve Earth.
The landing of the six-wheeled automobile would mark the third go to to Mars in simply over a week. Two spacecraft from the United Arab Emirates and China swung into orbit across the planet on successive days final week.
All three missions lifted off in July to benefit from the shut alignment of Earth and Mars, touring some 300 million miles in almost seven months.
Perseverance, the most important, most superior rover ever despatched by NASA, stood to turn into the ninth spacecraft to efficiently land on Mars, each one among them from the U.S.
The car-size, plutonium-powered rover was aiming for NASA’s smallest and trickiest goal but: a 5–by-4-mile strip on an historic river delta stuffed with pits, cliffs and fields of rock.
Scientists imagine that if life ever flourished on Mars, it could have occurred 3 billion to 4 billion years in the past, when water nonetheless flowed on the planet.
Percy, as it’s nicknamed, was designed to drill down with its 7-foot (2-meter) arm and gather rock samples that may maintain indicators of bygone microscopic life. The plan known as for 3 to 4 dozen chalk-size samples to be sealed in tubes and put aside on Mars to be retrieved by a fetch rover and introduced homeward by one other rocket ship, with the objective of getting them again to Earth as early as 2031.
Scientists hope to reply one of many central questions of theology, philosophy and house exploration.
“Are we alone in this sort of vast cosmic desert, just flying through space, or is life much more common? Does it just emerge whenever and wherever the conditions are ripe?” stated deputy challenge scientist Ken Williford. “Big, basic questions, and we don’t know the answers yet. So we’re really on the verge of being able to potentially answer these enormous questions.”
China’s spacecraft contains a smaller rover that additionally might be looking for proof of life — if it makes it safely down from orbit in May or June.
Perseverance’s descent has been described by NASA as “seven minutes of terror,” in which flight controllers can only watch helplessly. The preprogrammed spacecraft was designed to hit the Martian atmosphere at 12,100 mph (19,500 kph), then use a parachute to slow it down and a rocket-steered platform known as a sky crane to lower the rover the rest of the way to the surface.
Mars has proved a treacherous place: In the span of less than three months in 1999, a U.S. spacecraft was destroyed upon entering orbit because engineers mixed up metric and English units, and an American lander crashed on Mars after its engines cut out prematurely.
NASA is teaming up with the European Space Agency to bring the rocks home. Perseverance’s mission alone costs nearly $3 billion.
The only way to confirm — or rule out — signs of past life is to analyze the samples in the world’s best labs. Instruments small enough to be sent to Mars wouldn’t have the necessary precision.
“The Mars sample return project is probably the most challenging thing we’ve ever attempted within NASA,” stated planetary science director Lori Glaze, “and we don’t do any of these things alone.”
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