500 million km’patience’ end of the trip to Mars Contains dirt to find traces of life

View larger-“The touchdown was confirmed.” At 12:55 p.m. (local time) on the 18th, an announcement rang out in the control room of the jet propulsion research center of the NASA, California. The researchers, waiting for the results with nervous expressions, cheered all at once. On the 19th at 5:55 am Korean time, the Mars rover (mobile exploration robot)’Perseverance’ of the United States successfully landed on Mars. NASA said Percivirence landed on Mars after flying 466 million km in 204 days.

Percivirence signaled that it would land at the NASA control room at 5:48 am on the same day. The seven minutes of landing for Persivirance are called ‘7 minutes of horror’ because they have to go through a complex process from entering the atmosphere to descent and landing. Failure to slow it down could result in a probe that cost $2.7 billion (about 3 trillion won) to develop and crash into the ground. The control room held his breath and waited for the next signal. Since it takes 11 minutes and 20 seconds for the signal to arrive from Mars to Earth, the timing of the landing inrush signal has already been determined if the rover’s landing was successful.

Persistence, which means’patience’ in English, entered the atmosphere of Mars at 20,000 km/h, 16 times the speed of sound, while folded into a conical capsule to protect the body. The capsule has a thermal protection shield in front to prevent the high temperature rise above 1300 degrees in 80 seconds due to friction with the atmosphere. Four minutes after entering the atmosphere, the speed decreased to about 1500 km/h, and the speed was further reduced by deploying a huge 21.5m diameter parachute. The thermal protection shield fell off, revealing the periphery and skycrane in the capsule. The sky crane is used to reduce the speed to 2.7 km/h with a reverse propulsion engine to aid in deceleration, which is insufficient with a parachute, and then lowers the periphery with a nylon string.

The first photograph of the surface of Mars sent by Percivirence with cameras attached to the front and back after landing was a deserted plain with sparse rocks. It showed that it landed properly by choosing a flat place. US President Joe Biden, who watched the landings on TV at the White House, tweeted, “It proves once again that nothing is impossible before the power of science and the ingenuity of Americans.”

Percivirance is NASA’s 9th Mars lander and 5th Mars Rover. It is 3m long and weighs 1026kg, the size of a compact car. It had six wheels and was equipped with seven scientific equipment and 23 cameras. Percivirence, which uses plutonium nuclear batteries, will be on a mission to find traces of life on Mars for 687 days, a year. The special task is to collect samples of Martian soil. This is the first attempt to bring Martian soil to Earth.

The landing site of Percivirence,’Yejeuro Crater’, has a topography that appears to have formed a delta by depositing sediments as a river flows 3.5 billion years ago. ‘Jezero’ means’lake’ in the Slavic language and is named after a village in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This is because there is a similar delta terrain in this village. Scientists estimate that the sediments will be rich in organic matter, such as carbonates, which are necessary for life.

Not only the US, but also the UAE and Chinese Mars rovers successfully entered Mars this month. The Arab world’s first Mars probe’Amal’, launched by the UAE, entered Mars orbit on the 9th of this month, and Tianyuan 1, the Mars probe launched by China, on the 10th. Accordingly, the number of countries to explore Mars increased from the United States, Europe and India to the UAE and China.

In particular, China’s Tianwon landed on the surface of Mars in May and is planning to investigate the geological structure of Mars, soil, water and ice distribution. The private sector is also planning to explore Mars. Tesla founder Elon Musk’s SpaceX has also pledged to send a manned probe to Mars by 2024.

Mars’Touchdown’… Find traces of life