It’s July 30th, 2020, and Perseverance soared into the Florida morning sky on an Atlas V rocket. This was the start of a nearly 500 million kilometer journey to the red planet, with the car-sized rover, and a helicopter called Ingenuity, aboard. Almost 7 months later, on February 18th, comes its time to land. This we will cover in today's post.
Fast-forward to February 18th.
The first thing you need to know is that there are 2 stages for the rover to enter Mars’ atmosphere. The first stage is the Separos, the cruise stage, which is a platform with solar panels sitting on top of the rover’s backshell. 10 minutes after the rover hits the atmosphere. The heat shield starts doing its work of blocking all the flames and plasma from damaging the rover.
After that, we start the landing phase, which has 9 steps:
The first step is the capsule, in which the Perseverance starts to guide itself through the thin atmosphere of Mars. The next step is parachute deployment, which it's self-explanatory. The third step is the heat shield detachment, followed by the fourth step, the radar lock, in which the radar attached to the rover scans the land to see where it is.
Continuing with the fifth step, which is terrain relative navigation solution which is a process in which the radar tells the rover the exact location to land. Then, step six, in which risk till touch down rises by a lot. This step consists of the back shell separating from the sky crane, which is a small scaffolding with thrusters for the touchdown. Step seven, the engine light and descent to the surface starts. During Step 8, the sky crane lowers the rover with cables to the surface. This happens because the crane brings up too much dust if it gets close to the surface. Now the wheels are on the surface. Finally, step 9 is the riskiest stage of all: Sky crane separation. In this stage, the cables snap and the engine's power up to max thrust and the crane flies away to crash far away.
This is how the landing of the rover happened. I know this leaves you with a lot of questions, and facts to be explained about the rover and its purpose, but those will be the topic for another entry.
Thanks for sticking by and keep reading our blog to learn more about space facts!
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