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After a seven-month journey, NASA’s Mars 2020 mission will land on Mars next Thursday with the Perseverance rover, with the goal of searching for the first time the remains of ancient life. When the countdown is running, the tension at the US space agency’s control center is highest.
Written by: Judith de George | ABC
Engineers and researchers finalize the details of the final stretch and are able to adjust the spacecraft’s path to select the entry point in the atmosphere. From there the vehicle will begin to descend and be called the ‘Seven Minutes Terror’, a short but dizzying time that takes time to perform complex maneuvers until it falls to the ground.
Hundreds of things can go wrong, and perseverance means they have to do it completely autonomously, and eleven and a half minutes later the teams on the field do not know if it has succeeded. In addition, it will test two new technologies that have never been used before on the Red Planet.
Landing on Mars is absolutely an achievement. Only 40 percent of missions sent by any space agency are successful. The site chosen for persistence is the Xerox Crater, which is similar in size to a smaller car and its Curiosity predecessor.
Read the full post on ABC.
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