{"id":181338,"date":"2021-02-18T00:56:15","date_gmt":"2021-02-17T21:56:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/nasa-rover-attempting-most-difficult-martian-touchdown-yet-2\/"},"modified":"2021-02-18T00:56:15","modified_gmt":"2021-02-17T21:56:15","slug":"nasa-rover-attempting-most-difficult-martian-touchdown-yet-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/nasa-rover-attempting-most-difficult-martian-touchdown-yet-2\/","title":{"rendered":"#NASA rover attempting most difficult Martian touchdown yet"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#NASA rover attempting most difficult Martian touchdown yet<\/strong>”
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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.\u2014 Spacecraft aiming to land on Mars have skipped past the planet, burned up on entry, smashed into the surface, and made it down amid a fierce dust storm only to spit out a single fuzzy gray picture before dying.<\/p>\n

Almost 50 years after the first casualty at Mars, NASA is attempting its hardest Martian touchdown yet.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0rover named Perseverance<\/a>\u00a0is headed Thursday for a compact 5-mile-by-4-mile patch on the edge of an ancient river delta. It\u2019s filled with cliffs, pits, sand dunes and fields of rocks, any of which could doom the $3 billion mission. The once submerged terrain also could hold evidence of past life, all the more reason to gather samples at this spot for return to Earth 10 years from now.<\/p>\n

While NASA has done everything possible to ensure success, \u201cthere\u2019s always this fear that it won\u2019t work well, it won\u2019t go well,\u201d Erisa Stilley, a landing team engineer, said Tuesday. \u201cWe\u2019ve had a pretty good run of successful missions recently and you never want to be the next one that isn\u2019t. It\u2019s heartbreaking when it happ<\/a>ens.\u201d<\/p>\n

A look at NASA\u2019s latest mission:<\/p>\n

MARS MASTER<\/strong><\/p>\n

NASA has nailed eight of nine landing attempts, making the U.S. the only country to achieve a successful touchdown. China hopes to become the second nation in late spring with its own life-seeking rover; its vessel entered orbit around Mars last week along with a United Arab Emirates spacecraft. The red planet\u2019s extremely thin atmosphere makes it hard to get down safely. Russia has piled up the most lander losses at Mars and moon Phobos, beginning in the early 1970s. The European Space Agency also has tried and failed. Two NASA landers are still humming along: 2012\u2032s Curiosity rover and 2018\u2032s InSight. Launched last July, Perseverance will set down some 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) away at Jezero Crater, descending by parachute, rocket engines and sky crane. The millions of lines of software code and hundreds of thousands of electric parts have to work with precision. \u201cThere\u2019s no go-backs. There\u2019s no retries,\u201d deputy project manager Matt Wallace said Wednesday.<\/p>\n

TOUGHEST LANDING YET<\/strong><\/p>\n

NASA has equipped the 1-ton Perseverance \u2014 a beefier version of Curiosity \u2014 with the latest landing tech to ace this touchdown. A new autopilot tool will calculate the descending rover\u2019s distance to the targeted location and release the massive parachute at the precise moment. Then another system will scan the surface, comparing observations with on-board maps. The rover could detour up to 2,000 feet (600 meters) while seeking somewhere safe, Neil Armstrong style. Without these gizmos, Jezero Crater would be too risky to attempt. Once down, the six-wheeled Perseverance should be the best driver Mars has ever seen, with more autonomy and range than Curiosity. \u201cPercy\u2019s got a new set of kicks,\u201d explained chief engineer Adam Steltzner, \u201cand she is ready for trouble on this Martian surface with her new wheels.\u201d<\/p>\n

LOOKING FOR SIGNS OF LIFE<\/strong><\/p>\n

Where there was water, there may have been life. That\u2019s why NASA wants Perseverance snooping around Jezero Crater, once home to a lake fed by a river. It\u2019s now bone dry, but 3.5 billion years ago, this Martian lake was as big and wet as Nevada and California\u2019s Lake Tahoe. Perseverance will shoot lasers at rocks judged most likely to contain evidence of past microscopic life, analyzing the emitted vapor, and drill into the best candidates. A few dozen core samples \u2014 about a pound\u2019s worth (one-half kilogram) of rock and dust \u2014 will be set aside in sealed titanium tubes for future pickup.<\/p>\n

ROUND-TRIP<\/a> TICKET<\/strong><\/p>\n

Scientists have wanted to get hold of Mars rocks ever since NASA\u2019s Mariners provided the first close pictures a half-century ago. NASA is teaming up with the European Space Agency to do just that. The bold plan calls for a rover and return rocket to launch to Mars in 2026, to retrieve Perseverance\u2019s stash of samples. NASA expects to bring back the rocks as early as 2031, several years before the first astronauts might arrive on the scene. The rover\u2019s super sterilized sample tubes are the cleanest components ever sent into space, according to NASA, to avoid any contaminating traces of Earth.<\/p>\n

COVID-19 PRECAUTIONS<\/strong><\/p>\n

Speaking of clean, NASA\u2019s Mars Mission Control has never been so spotless. Instead of passing around jars of peanuts right before Perseverance\u2019s landing \u2014 a good luck tradition going back decades \u2014 masked flight controllers will get their own individual bags. It\u2019s one of many COVID-19 precautions at California\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The landing team will be spread over multiple rooms, with NASA bigwigs and journalists watching remotely. Launched last July, the aptly named Perseverance bears a plaque honoring health care workers battling the virus over the past year.\n <\/p><\/div>\n

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“#NASA rover attempting most difficult Martian touchdown yet” CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.\u2014 Spacecraft aiming to land on Mars have skipped past the planet, burned up on entry, smashed into the surface, and made it down amid a fierce dust storm only to spit out a single fuzzy gray picture before dying. Almost 50 years after the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":181339,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/nypost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2021\/02\/mars-1-1.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1200","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70897],"tags":[93713,36620,6642,5026],"class_list":["post-181338","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-2-17-21","tag-aliens","tag-florida","tag-nasa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181338","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181338"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181338\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/181339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}