It’s not the cheapest technique I can envision but it certainly was very successful this afternoon!
Ingredients:
- Planet Mars
- Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
- Mars 2020 Perseverance Lander
- “Seven Minutes of Terror”
So, nerd that I am (and have been repeatedly accused of being by my daughter Katie!)…of course I was taking a break from the current project of mining the interesting Facebook posts of the past several years and preserving them for posterity on sunfox.com to watch the play-by-play of the descent of Perseverance to the surface of Mars.
After all, this is a *HUGE* deal to perfect the technique of landing heavy payloads on planets and moons after sending it on a journey through space hundreds of millions of kilometers or longer for months or years at a time where you’ll be thrilled if you can arrive at the destination safely.
There’s so many things that can go wrong along the way from the launch vehicle blowing up to getting the trajectory wrong or in some cases transposing imperial and metric measurements. And even when everything foreseeable has been accounted for, all it takes is a bit of stray dust or rock striking the craft at high speed or a big burst of radiation that is unexpected and kills the electronic components and the very expensive mission is completely buggered.
And even when you get there, there’s the prospect of the harrowing seven minute journey from 12,000 mph at atmospheric entry interface to the surface ending in a spectacular fireball of wreckage. They don’t call it the “seven minutes of terror” for nothing when you’re hoping that billion-dollar piece of hardware sticks the landing thanks to a “sky crane” that lowers the lander softly to the surface and then flies away from the landing site!
Most of the time you don’t know what’s happening in real-time given the distances involved. At time of landing, signals from Mars take about 11 minutes 22 seconds to make it to Earth. So to give you an idea of how smart the boffins at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena are…they timed the entry and landing to be at the exact time the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) would be in the proper position to monitor the landing sequence and essentially give us the play-by-play of events indicating a successful landing.
That is some big-league rocket science and maths, people! 🙂
So yes, as it was becoming clear that Perseverance was going to stick the landing and mission control reported successful touchdown and the craft was functioning nominally…I gave out a huge yell that scared many poos out of Nicholas who was ironically turning on the washing machine at the exact time of touchdown.
Sue me. 🙂
This is a *MONUMENTAL* achievement and some of the experiments aboard the lander are really cutting-edge to dramatically improve our understanding of Mars as well as deploying new craft to explore the planet. For the first time ever, they will be flying an autonomous vehicle (kind of like a drone) which they might well use in future missions such as the one proposed for Saturn’s moon Titan. They will be also trying to definitively prove the existence of ancient life on Mars which is the next likely destination for human exploration along with the return to the Moon.
In an age where we are locked in a mortal struggle against the COVID-19 pandemic, anything like the amazing successful landing of Perseverance to advance our scientific and technological capabilities and inspire the next generations to one day walk upon the Moon or Mars or beyond…these are exactly the things our virus-weary world needs to give us hope for that better future.
Well done JPL and may you have many years of successful exploration along with Curiosity and the Spirit and Opportunity landers that came before. 🙂