Hey,
A belated happy valentines to you all, particularly anyone who has supported, shared or referred their friends to C’mere to me, I love you 💜
This one is all about Mars and it took a little longer than some to put together so I think it’s worth a read if you’re interested — but no probs if not, just scroll down for some funny tweets 🕊
Anyway, C’mere to me…
Interesting
The Perseverance Rover 🚀🕹
Scheduled landing this Thursday, 20:55 pm (IST)
You might have heard that last week the UAE’s Hope probe entered a stable orbit around Mars. The mission is part of a wider geopolitical rebrand away from oil into science and tech, it wasn’t groundbreaking but nevertheless an impressive feat on their first try, only the second country to do so, behind India.
This was the first photo released just yesterday, taken by the probe in orbit.
Image: United Arab Emirates Space Agency
“The Hope orbiter carries three sensors designed to make the first comprehensive weather observations across the planet’s surface. The $200 million mission is the keystone of a national effort to make science and technology mainstays of the small Gulf state’s economy in anticipation of a day when its oil revenues dwindle, U.A.E. officials said.”
(read more - WSJ)
The launch window for Mars only opens every 26 months, hence why everyone is arriving at the same time. It also takes between 6 and 8 months to get there, traveling at enormous speed.
Image: NASA
Last Wednesday, China arrived into orbit too — with a much more ambitious project and their own rover scheduled to land later in the year.
“Tianwen-1, which means "Questioning the Heavens," launched on July 23, 2020 and is China’s first independent interplanetary mission. It arrived in orbit around Mars after a 202-day, 295-million-mile (475 million kilometers) journey through deep space. It snapped an image of the Red Planet during its final approach.
The spacecraft consists of both an orbiter and a rover. The landing attempt for the rover is not expected until May or June, giving the orbiter time to image and map out the intended landing site in a region known as Utopia Planitia.”
(read more - Space.com)
On Thursday, the US is going to join the party, but much more spectacularly, at least at first, when they try to put their new rover, Perseverance, on the ground.
To be clear, landing on Mars is really hard, only about 50% of Martian landing attempts, by any space agency, have been successful.1
NASA’s Curiosity rover successfully landed back in 2012 and has since gathered a remarkable amount of data. Achieving its goal of finding ancient organic material and showing that Mars did once have the right chemistry to support microbial life. It also took measurements of radiation levels and more, critical in assessing the conditions for future human missions.
As of writing this, Perseverance is traveling at more than 15 times the speed of a bullet… and has been on its way since last summer.
View the live stats - here
On entry to the Martian atmosphere, the craft’s heat shield will hit a temperature of over 2,100°C 2, and it will slow down to around 1,600kmp/h.
Next, an extremely strong supersonic parachute will deploy, slowing the craft down further to around 320kmp/h, which is still far too fast to land. The heat shield also gets detached, exposing the radar and cameras to work out its altitude the landing trajectory. Lastly, boosters are deployed to do the final major slow down, before lowering the rover to the surface by wires.
If the boosters went right the way down to the surface, they would kick up so much dust it would damage the sensors and equipment on the rover, which is why the ‘sky crane’ manoeuvre is used (see the GIF below).
As sci-fi as this looks, this is legitimately what they are going to attempt to do…
It takes about 7mins from the top of the atmosphere to landing, and this is known as ‘the seven minutes of terror’ because there is little to no margin for error.
Perseverance has to perform all of the entry and landing manoeuvres autonomously as it takes between 3 to 22mins to receive a radio communication signal from Mars (depending on where Mars is relative to the Earth) so it’s not possible for humans to intervene during the landing. On Thursday night it’s going to be like watching tv coverage 12 mins behind what’s happening ‘live’.
Jezero Crater, the landing site, is believed to have once been flooded with water and was chosen for its high potential for finding signs of past microbial life. Advancements in the tech onboard Perseverance will allow for a much more accurate landing and thus much less driving time. If you miss, it could take the rover months to drive to where you want it to, we are talking about a planet here… and there ain’t no roads.
Perseverance is on a different mission to Curiosity so although they look very similar they are very different. She has some seriously cool tech on board, from a ‘Mars helicopter’ drone to a CO2 to O2 generator and really complex sample collection tools - see NASA’s Mars 2020 website for all the details.
Image: NASA/JPL
The Curiosity rover is still there and is still operational. I personally think it’s really cool that, all going well, there will be two of them just roaming around, albeit, in different spots.
Mark Rober, who worked on Curiosity, posted an excellent and trending video explaining it much better than I ever could…
I’ll definitely be tuning in for (hopefully 🤞🏼) a smooth landing on Thursday at approx 20:55 Irish time, it’ll be on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook everywhere @NASA
Smile 😊
Saved 📷
Think 🌊
The international space station takes the smartest people on the planet and turns them into maintenance workers
That’s all 🤙🏽
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Disclaimer.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/press_kits/mars_2020/download/mars_2020_landing_press_kit.pdf
https://nerdist.com/article/nasa-perseverance-rover-mars-landing/