NASA’s Perseverance Droid Lands on Mars, Phones Home
By Bob Granath
A droid exploring a distant planet is not only the stuff of science fiction, it is today’s reality. NASA’s Perseverance rover successfully landed on Mars at 3:55 p.m. EST on Feb. 18, 2021 and promptly phoned home beaming back the first of what should be thousands of detained images and science data from the Red Planet.
Perseverance, also known as the Mars 2020 Rover, is the largest, most advanced spacecraft NASA has sent to another world. It bargain its 293-million-mile journey to Mars at 7:50 a.m. EDT on July 30, 2020 lifting off atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Space Launch Complex 41 at Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
Mission controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California burst into applause and cheers when telemetry confirmed that the spacecraft had completed its hazardous entry into the Martian atmosphere and safely touched down in the Jezero Crater.
Acting NASA Administrator Steve Jurczyk praised the Perseverance team at JPL and said he is looking forward to what will be learned from the spacecraft packed with groundbreaking technology.
“This landing is one of those pivotal moments for NASA, the United States, and space exploration globally – when we know we are on the cusp of discovery and sharpening our pencils, so to speak, to rewrite the textbooks,” he said. “The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission embodies our nation’s spirit of persevering even in the most challenging of situations, inspiring, and advancing science and exploration. The mission itself personifies the human ideal of persevering toward the future and will help us prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet in the 2030s.”
About the size of a car and weighing 2,263-pounds, Perseverance will act as robotic geologist and astrobiologist. A fundamental part of its mission is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover also will investigate the rock and sediment of Jezero’s ancient lake bed and river delta to characterize the region’s geology and past climate.
Plans call for Perseverance to collect soil samples to be returned to Earth as scientists continue the search for definitive signs of past life on the Red Planet.
“Because of today’s exciting events, the first pristine samples from carefully documented locations on another planet are another step closer to being returned to Earth,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for science at NASA. “Perseverance is the first step in bringing back rock and regolith from Mars. We don’t know what these pristine samples from Mars will tell us. But what they could tell us is monumental – including that life might have once existed beyond Earth.”
JPL Director Michael Watkins believes the Perseverance landing is another step toward landing humans on the Red Planet.
“Landing on Mars is always an incredibly difficult task and we are proud to continue building on our past success,” he said. “But, while Perseverance advances that success, this rover is also blazing its own path and daring new challenges in the surface mission. We built the rover not just to land but to find and collect the best scientific samples for return to Earth, and its incredibly complex sampling system and autonomy not only enable that mission, they set the stage for future robotic and crewed missions.”
Click here to read more about the mission of NASA’s Perseverance rover.
Perilous Decent to the Red Planet
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