For astrobiologist Inge Loes ten Kate (Utrecht University), the highlights of 2020 took place a little further away in the solar system: she was especially happy with the successes in picking up from cosmic grit from two different asteroids and the departure of a new batch of Mars probes.
On one of those Mars missions, covid-19 actually threw a spanner in the works, says Ten Kate. The European / Russian Marsrover Rosalind Franklin is parked on earth for a while. Experts were barely able to fly back and forth between the space companies because of the pandemic. That is why the launch has been postponed to 2022. But, Ten Kate puts it into perspective, the launch was already hanging by a thread. “Corona was the last straw.” It has its advantages: because of the delay, the parachutes used for landing, among other things, can be tested even more.
‘Seven minutes of terror’
Three other Mars missions did go this year. Ten Kate is especially looking forward to the landing of the NASA rover Perseverance in February. Then NASA flight control must again nail-biting the infamous seven minutes of terror just as in 2012 when the predecessor Curiosity landed. In those seven minutes, the moon cart, the size of a small car, has to slow down in the atmosphere and land on the ground at a flying crane.
Is that going well again? “Why not, I say optimistically. If you assume that things are going wrong, you better not do the mission. We now know what to do to get it right. But it remains Mars. We have with the European Schiaparelli. Lander also saw how things can go wrong. And that was in 2016, not so long ago. “
In this animation from earlier this year you can see what Perseverance has to do on Mars:
–
