After a seven-month, nearly 300-million-mile journey to Mars, NASA's Perseverance rover is ready to undertake one of the most challenging engineering feats in human history: landing on the Red Planet.
At 3:55 pm ET today, the 1,025-kilogram rover, the heaviest object ever sent to the surface of another planet, should set its wheels on the reddish earth of Jezero Crater to begin its search for signs of past life But to get to the ground, the rover must endure what NASA calls the "seven minutes of terror." The spacecraft carrying the rover has hurtled from Earth to Mars and will crash into the atmosphere at high speed. Then, within about seven minutes, the spacecraft should slow its descent and gently settle to the surface.
"Landing on Mars is really about finding a way to stop," says Allen Chen, the lead engineer for Perseverance's entry, descent, and landing (EDL) system. "Perseverance will hit the atmosphere at over 12,000 miles per hour, but it needs to land at about 2 miles per hour."
To land, Perseverance will use an aerial crane, a system devised by NASA and used in 2012 to successfully deposit the Curiosity rover in Gale Crater on Mars. And, for the first time, video cameras and microphones will capture the full descent of a spacecraft as it lands on Mars. "We really want to take people for a ride this time and see what it's like to land on another planet," says Chen.
You can watch live coverage of the landing on NASA's YouTube channel in Spanish beginning at 2:15 p.m. ET, as the mission control team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California tracks the spaceship descent. But the video and audio of Perseverance's landing will take longer to broadcast on Earth. Due to the current distance between the two planets, sending even a basic radio signal to Earth will take about 11 1/2 minutes. And before you can transmit the audio or video, the mobile must first indicate that it is secure. It will then have various other tasks to perform during its first few days on Mars, such as starting its surface operations software and deploying a mast with its primary science cameras.
If all goes according to plan, the rover will send back an image tomorrow showing the view of Perseverance from above. By Monday, the team hopes to release a video from the same view. High-quality image data will take longer to transmit and process, so NASA should release high-resolution images of the entire landing sequence in the coming weeks.
But first, the spacecraft must reach the surface safely.
