First days on Mars for Nasa's Perseverance rover
After hurtling through space for seven months, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (Nasa) Mars rover Perseverance made a historic landing on the Red Planet on Feb 18, giving earthlings a chance to listen to the sounds on the planet for the first time. Shabana Begum highlights pictures seen through the eyes of the mission team, and the most advanced astrobiology lab sent to another planet.
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An illustration of Perseverance casting off its spacecraft’s cruise stage, minutes before piercing the Martian atmosphere and bracing itself for landing, the shortest but most nail-biting part of its flight. Nasa dubbed the spacecraft’s self-guided entry, descent and landing process as the "seven minutes of terror". Every manoeuvre had to be planned perfectly. It takes more than 11 minutes to get a radio signal back from Mars. This means the rover had already landed by the time the mission team learnt that the spacecraft had entered the atmosphere.
PHOTO: AFP/NASA
An artist's impression of Nasa's Mars helicopter, Ingenuity, flying through the Red Planet's skies. While the Perseverance rover trawls the terrain on Mars, the drone-like Ingenuity is expected to make history by being the first aircraft to fly in another world. Ingenuity is currently attached to the belly of Perseverance, and will continue its gestation period, which is between 30 and 60 days. It is tapping the rover's power supply to charge its batteries. But once it is set free, the helicopter's batteries will be charged by its own solar panel. Ingenuity will be flying a 31-day experimental flight test.
PHOTO: NASA/JPL-CALTECH
The first high-resolution, colour image of the Red Planet taken by the rover after touchdown on Feb 18. The robotic vehicle landed in the Jezero Crater, which is located north of Mars' equator. The crater is 45km wide, and is believed to have been a lake and home to an ancient river delta more than 3.5 billion years ago. The lake could have supported microbial life, and remains might be found in lakebed or shoreline sediments. The rover will drill into rocks to collect more than 30 rock cores and dust samples, and place them inside hardy test tubes. The samples will be collected in a return mission in the 2030s.
PHOTO: NASA/JPL-CALTECH
The parachute that helped to land the Perseverance. Using binary code, Nasa’s systems engineer Ian Clark spelt out "Dare Mighty Things" on the inside of the parachute. The secret message is a phrase from a famous speech by former US president Theodore Roosevelt. The parachute's outer ring also concealed the GPS coordinates of the space agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, where the rover was built and the project managed.
PHOTO: NASA/JPL-CALTECH
The Atlas V rocket, holding the rover with the Ingenuity helicopter attached as well as the Mars 2020 spacecraft, starting its seven-month space journey on July 30 last year. It was launched at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Atlas V is one of the largest rockets available for interplanetary flight.
PHOTO: UNITED LAUNCH ALLIANCE
An illustration of Perseverance using a high-tech instrument at the end of its robotic arm to scrutinise Martian rocks. The rover holds seven key state-of-the-art instruments that will help the US space agency find out more about the planet’s geology, atmosphere, environmental conditions, and potential signs of past and present life. The mission’s aim is to find fossilised signs of microbes that may have thrived on Mars three billion years ago, when the planet was warmer, wetter and potentially hospitable to life. Attached to the end of the rover’s 2.1m-long robotic arm is a lunchbox-sized instrument, called PIXL, which can identify chemical elements at a tiny scale.
PHOTO: JPL.NASA.GOV
