Imagine: You've designed and built a billion-dollar rover to investigate another planet and launched it into space. It's made its way through the darkness on a seven-month journey to Mars, and it's finally arrived at its destination. Now, you just have to get it to the surface and you can start exploring.
The landing isn't going to be easy, though. Your craft will be traveling at over 12,000 miles per hour when it hits the martian atmosphere – and that atmosphere is so thin that parachutes work differently there than they do on Earth. Fluctuations in wind speeds and the amount of dust in the atmosphere are extremely hard to predict and can affect the landing. And you need to set down your 2,200-pound rover gently enough not to break anything.
Oh, and on top of all that, Mars is so far away that there's a communication delay of up to 20 minutes, so you can't control anything in real time. You have to program the craft to land itself, and once descent begins, you can't do anything to help it. You can only sit and watch as your precious spacecraft goes hurtling toward the planet's surface, in a period that engineers call the "seven minutes of terror".
Overseeing this nail-biting horror is the real-life job of Gregorio Villar, a systems engineer on the the Entry, Descent, and Landing (EDL) team for the Perseverance rover at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). He told us about what it takes to land a rover on Mars.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.