• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Perseverance To Set Down On Mars This Week

https://www.nasa.gov/johnson/HWHAP/mars-perseverance-landing


How many other people are anxious for Perseverance to land on Mars this week?

I for one wish NASA would have mounted camers on the delivery vehicle to take photos of the journey to Mars and the entry.

Do you think Big P will find ancient microbial life on Mars?
I don't think there was much of a delivery vehicle that would be able to take pictures of the entry. Based on this NASA/JPL graphic showing Perseverance's journey, only the ring thing shown on the left would not be making the main entry.

While they have multiple cameras to show the later stages of landing, we won't be seeing those videos for at least a week or two at the earliest due to the slow transmission speeds directly from Perseverance and the daily 8 minute window it has to transmit to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). They will have some assistance from the other orbiters of NASA and the European Space Agency to try and monitor the landing.
1zWTLZM.jpg
 
It was awesome to hear how excited NASA was when the parahute deployed. At that point the landing was basically a Superstar moment.

I can also imagine that the Mars anomoly hunters are salivating at the mouth waiting for new pics of Mars.
 
This really is a stunning achievement. Like Curiosity before it, a million things could have gone wrong, especially with something as complicated as a skycrane. The fact that everything went off without a hitch (Mars helicopter deployment notwithstanding as it hasn't happened yet) is a testament to the hard work NASA has been doing with the space program of late.
 
Shot of Perseverance's descent with the parachute deployed taken by the High Resolution Imaging Experiment (HiRISE) aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO):
CnyIXVy.png


Shot taken from the descent stage while Perseverance was being lowered to the Martian surface:
dRr56tM.png


First color picture from Perseverance (previous shots were taken with protective lens cap still on):
IuLymX3.png
 
In December, we had a guy on the team that gave a talk to our local club about Perseverance and all the hardware on board. He was there yesterday in Mission Control and was one of the leads, including in designing the AEGIS tool system. Once it landed, his role was switching to surface operations, so it's been interesting for him to say the least. The hard part now is switching to a Mars schedule.
 
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top