![]() ![]() The great distance involved takes about 11 minutes to receive the news that the Perseverance has entered the Martian atmosphere. This is all done by itself, with no help from those that control the spacecraft on Earth, due to the time delay for signals to reach the spacecraft. Perseverance is only the fifth rover to try to attempt this type of landing. ![]() Only about 40% of all mission sent to Mars, by any space agency have been successful. The goal of going from the highspeed entrance to the atmosphere down to zero in seven minutes, while trying to hit the target landing area is difficult. ![]() After a 7 month voyage from Earth to Mars, traveling at a speed of over 50,000mph, the final seven minutes from the top of the atmosphere to touchdown on the surface will be the most complex portion of the entire mission. NASA calls the entry, descent and landing phase the “seven minutes of terror”. The one ton, six wheeled vehicle the size of a small car is expected to attempt the difficult challenge to land on Mars. JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, built Curiosity for NASA and leads the mission on behalf of the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.On Thursday, February 18 th, NASA’s Perseverance Rover will blaze through the atmosphere on Mars, at 12:30pm PST. Through careful planning and engineering hacks, the team has every expectation the plucky rover still has years of exploring to ahead of it. “Curiosity is definitely doing more multitasking where it’s safe to do so,” Mishkin added. Mishkin said the team is continuing to budget how much energy the rover uses each day, and has figured out which activities can be done in parallel to optimize the energy available to the rover. Because of the pellets’ gradual decay, the rover can’t do quite as much in a day as it did during its first year. As the plutonium pellets in the battery decay, they generate heat that the rover converts into power. Curiosity relies on a long-lived nuclear-powered battery rather than solar panels to keep on rolling. The team has taken a similar approach to managing the rover’s slowly diminishing power. To minimize damage to the wheels, engineers keep an eye out for treacherous spots like the knife-edged “gator-back” terrain they recently discovered, and they developed a traction-control algorithm to help as well. Although the arm has been operating as usual since engineers engaged a set of spares, the team has also learned to drill more gently to preserve the new brakes. More recently, a set of braking mechanisms that allow the robotic arm to move or stay in place stopped working. #NASA MARS LANDING OFFLINE#At one point, the drill was offline for more than a year as engineers redesigned its use to be more like a handheld drill. “It’s all about making intelligent use of what’s already on your rover.”Ĭuriosity’s robotic drilling process, for example, has been reinvented multiple times since landing. “As soon as you land on Mars, everything you do is based on the fact that there’s no one around to repair it for 100 million miles,” said Andy Mishkin, Curiosity’s acting project manager at JPL. #NASA MARS LANDING CODE#They catalog each and every crack in the wheels, test every line of computer code before it’s beamed into space, and drill into endless rock samples in JPL’s Mars Yard, ensuring Curiosity can safely do the same. What’s Curiosity’s secret to maintaining an active lifestyle at the ripe old age of 10? A team of hundreds of dedicated engineers, of course, working both in person at JPL and remotely from home. Within it, they have targets in mind like the Gediz Vallis channel, which may have formed during a flood late in Mount Sharp’s history, and large cemented fractures that show the effects of groundwater higher up the mountain. The team plans to spend the next few years exploring the sulfate-rich area. ![]()
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