The Perseverance rover has landed on Martian soil after seven months of travel, the US space agency announced Thursday, a resounding success for NASA which marks the start of a multi-year mission.
“Landing confirmed! “, exclaimed Swati Mohan, in charge of operations control. In the control room of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, California, the teams present exploded with joy at the time of confirmation.
Jezero Crater, which scientists believe contained a lake 3.5 billion years ago, was the most perilous landing site NASA ever attempted. Perseverance will be responsible for collecting evidence of ancient life on Mars.
Seven months of space travel, decades of work and billions of dollars to answer a single question: Did life ever exist anywhere other than Earth? This is the mission of the last NASA rover, which is only a few minutes away from its landing on Mars on Thursday.
«Trip to Mars 99.9% complete», Tweeted the US space agency Thursday morning. “The most dangerous part comes to the end: the last seven minutes».
Around 9:55 p.m. in France, the vehicle will enter the Martian atmosphere at a speed of 20,000 km / h, protected by its heat shield which will not be released until after the opening of a huge supersonic parachute. Eight retro-rockets will eventually slow him down before he deploys his six wheels, suspended along cables until contact with the ground.
Find traces of ancient life
For the first time, the mission of the American space agency has the explicit goal of finding traces of ancient life on the red planet, by collecting over several years up to thirty rock samples.
The sealed tubes will then have to be brought back to Earth by a future mission, in the 2030s, in order to be analyzed and perhaps finally be able to respond to “one questions that have inhabited us for centuries, namely: are we alone in the universe? ”, Underlined Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for science at NASA.
Perseverance is the largest and most complex vehicle ever to be sent to Mars. Built at the legendary Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, it weighs a ton, is equipped with a robotic arm of more than two meters and 19 cameras.
If the rover arrives intact, first images could be transmitted soon after.
Proof that the mission is also the result of international cooperation: French President Emmanuel Macron, whose country designed one of the rover’s many scientific instruments, will attend the landing at the Paris headquarters of the National Center for Space Studies (Cnes).
Exceptional discovery
Researchers believe that Jezero crater was home to a deep lake about 50 km wide 3.5 billion years ago.
«We have very strong evidence that Mars could have harbored life in the distant past, ”said Ken Williford, deputy head of the mission, on Wednesday. “The question is: is (life on) Earth an anomaly, a stroke of luck?”
The first samples should start this summer. Several routes are planned in order to dig in different environments, in particular the shore of the old lake, and the delta formed by a river which flowed into it.
Scientists are looking for what they call biosignatures: traces of microbial life that “can take all kinds of forms,” for example “chemicals” or “environmental changes,” said Mary Voytek, program director. astrobiology for NASA. “We astrobiologists have dreamed of this mission for decades,” she said enthusiastically.
«Either we find life, and it would be an exceptional find, or it is not, (..) and it will suggest that not all habitable environments are inhabited“, Warned Ken Farley, scientist of the project. And that we will have to look elsewhere.
The 450 or so team members who will pilot this phase will also work in exceptional conditions because of the Covid-19 pandemic, he stressed: “the mission will be carried out from the people’s lounge, all over the place. of the globe ”.
Record Martian sound
The first months of the mission will not however be devoted to this first objective. Parallel experiments are planned.
NASA wants in particular to prove that it is possible to fly a motorized vehicle on another planet. The helicopter, baptized Ingenuity, will have to be able to rise in air with a density equivalent to 1% of that of the Earth’s atmosphere.
Two microphones could also, for the first time, record Martian sound.
NASA will also experience the production of oxygen directly on site, using an instrument the size of a car battery functioning much like a plant, by sucking carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere.
This oxygen could be used by future human settlers to breathe, but also as fuel.
Perseverance will only be the fifth rover to set foot on Martian soil. Since the first one, in 1997, they have all been Americans, and one of them, Curiosity, is still in business.
But China recently placed its “Tianwen-1” probe into orbit around Mars, containing an unmanned robot that is expected to attempt to land around May.
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