One of three Mars missions- NASA's rover will land near a crater that is a good candidate for finding evidence of life.
NASA’s Mars rover, Perseverance, aims for dicey landing to search for ancient life
Read the rest of the article at the link.They call it the “seven minutes of terror,” which doesn’t do justice to the weeks of anxiety, troubleshooting, second-guessing, sleepless nights — the mental cataloguing of all that could go wrong and all that must go exactly right. One cataloger is Matt Wallace, deputy project manager for NASA’s Perseverance rover mission. He has a simple way of describing what the space agency expects him and his fellow engineers to do: “Land a car on Mars.”This is one of the hardest technological feats human beings have ever attempted. The spacecraft carrying Perseverance, which launched from Earth at the end of July, is expected to arrive on Thursday at Mars at 12,000 miles per hour — six times faster than a bullet shot from an M16 — in what amounts to a controlled collision. Somehow, that velocity has to reach zero, with the rover deposited lovingly on the surface inside a crater named Jezero.
Hitting the 4.8-mile-wide landing site targeted by NASA after a journey of 300 million miles is akin to throwing a dart from the White House and scoring a bull’s eye in Dallas.
his is one of NASA’s most important endeavors, the first multibillion-dollar Mars mission in nine years and the initial phase of a three-mission campaign to return samples of Martian soil to Earth. The rover is poised to land just days after two other robotic spacecraft, launched by China and the United Arab Emirates, reached Mars and went into orbit.
Perseverance will do more than probe the surface: It will also test technologies that someday could be used on Mars by astronauts, including a system for converting atmospheric carbon dioxide to oxygen. NASA’s human spaceflight program aims for a return mission to the moon in coming years, but Mars remains the horizon goal.