NASA engineers and scientists were ecstatic upon the landing of Perseverance on Mars after sweating through the fabled “seven minutes of terror” during a fiery descent that took the rover from 12,000 miles an hour down to less than 2 mph—with the help of a parachute, cables and a jet backpack.
It all worked on Thursday, due in no small measure to years of effort and $2.8 billion in costs for the total Mars 2020 project over a decade. The pandemic made it even more complex as spaceship hardware was being shipped from California to Florida for assembly for launch on July 30, 2020 and its trip to the Red Planet of 140 million miles.
Working at NASA and Jet Propulsion Laboratory is a plum job for engineers partly because the odds of a crash or explosion are so great. One engineer said he sweated through two shirts the night before the landing, up from his normal one.
It helps to have some luck, or at least superstitions.
Years ago, a series of rovers crashed, but on a seventh try, one control room engineer showed up with a jar of peanuts and the mission succeeded. Since that time, the tradition of control room engineers snacking on peanuts at a launch has carried on, again for the Thursday landing. There is even a single peanut aboard Perseverance, although it isn’t clear how NASA has avoided peanut allergies for its workers.
A plaque has also been mounted to the outside of Perseverance to commemorate much of the work was done during a global COVID-19 pandemic. It bears a symbol of NASA combined with a well-known medical icon as a reminder to future visitors that 2020 was terrible year on planet Earth.
Now the hard work begins for prepping tests of the 4-pound Ingenuity drone helicopter in the extremely thin atmosphere of Mars, just 1% that of Earth’s. Four-foot rotors that spin very fast and lightweight materials will help.
It will take more than a month before a true Ingenuity test begins, one of possibly five. Scientists have to find the ideal spot for a test, then direct the rover to travel there and gently drop Ingenuity to the surface when it will unfold its legs and get ready to fly. The first flight will be 12 to 15 feet up and back to land again, just enough to see whether future horizontal tests of a football field in distance will work.
A series of science projects have also suddenly sprung to life, now that the landing has been a success. A lead scientist at NASA described how his smartphone suddenly began blowing up with messages just after the successful landing from researchers around the globe sending texts and emails to be sure their projects get priority.
Perseverance is equipped with drilling equipment to take core samples, which NASA eventually hopes to return to Earth for analysis in hopes of detecting ancient microbial life. Scientists believe water flowed on Mars billions of years ago, sustaining some form of life. Now the planet is dry except for polar ice caps due to the lack of an atmosphere. The Martian global magnetic field force disappeared billions of years ago, meaning the planet has not been able to hold onto atmospheric gases.
Scientists from Spain are heading up a project called Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA) that includes others from Europe in the creation of a second weather station on Mars to work in tandem with another station near where the Curiosity rover landed in 2012 about 1,200 miles from Perseverance. With two simultaneous measurements of humidity and pressure, wind speed and direction, as well as dust and radiation, scientists will be able to help prepare for human exploration with a daily weather report. The insights from MEDA could inform meteorologists on Earth where buildings and grass affect wind and other weather patterns.
Even more ambitiously, scientists hope to direct Perseverance to spots in and near the edge of the Jezero Crater where it landed along an ancient river delta to drill to find the most likely evidence of life. Such evidence would expand the understanding of how life developed on other planets, including Earth, offering a treasure trove of basic insights to researchers everywhere.
As for the Ingenuity helicopter, assuming all goes well, it could pave the way for future drone flights on Mars or other planets, hovering just above and ahead of autonomous rovers or vehicles driven by astronauts.
Such helicopters would be able to visualize the landscape to orient vehicles around steep crevasses, cliffs and boulders. Also, drone helicopters would be able to descend into caves and other places that astronauts would not be able to reach.
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