Perseverance

On Thursday evening I headed out into the local park and looked up at the sky. My eyes went first to the brightest object, the just under half lit Moon. But then it turned to the bright red dot just above it: Mars.

I imagined what was about to happen in the skies above Mars. The Perseverance rover was going to detach from its cruise stage and slam into the Martian atmosphere, initially slowed by its heatshield then later by a supersonic parachute. As it approached its target, Jezero Crater, the heatshield would be ejected so Perseverance could take a good look at the land below and compare what it saw against internal maps. When it knew where it was and where the nearest safe landing spot was, the parachute would be ejected and the lander flown by the rocket powered descent stage. This would manoeuvre until it was hovering above a safe landing spot, where it would slowly lower the rover down on cables until it just kissed the sands of Mars. Cutting the cords, the descent stage would fly away having safely delivered Perseverance .

Would it all work? There’re so many things that can go wrong in a very short time with no chance for mission controllers back on Earth to respond. It’s why they call it the 7 minutes of terror.

I went inside to follow the JPL’s live stream and watch this video preview of the landing:

Nasa had arranged other missions around Mars to relay information, so there was a steady stream of updates until those happy words that Perseverance was safely on the ground.

What was amazing is that one of the spacecraft around Mars even took a photo that showed Perseverance floating on its parachute down towards the surface:

Just amazing!

It’s been a busy time around Mars with other missions arriving, including one from the UAE and another from China, and congratulations to all of those involved.

I have been doing a little perseverance of my own, in writing, and in my next post I’ll update on the status on Noctilucents Book 2.