![]() "It's a very big parachute, the size of a Little League infield and it snaps open in about point-six seconds while going almost Mach 2 (twice the speed of sound)." "There's a lot of concentrated risk in that supersonic parachute opening," said Allen Chen, the engineer in charge of the rover's entry, descent and landing. Hitting the thin, mostly carbon dioxide "air" at a blistering 12,000 mph, the spacecraft will rapidly decelerate, enduring heat shield temperatures as high as 2,370 degrees as it slows to just under 1,000 mph within about four minutes.Īt that point, at an altitude of about seven miles and a velocity of around 940 mph, a 70.5-foot-wide parachute will unfurl in the supersonic slipstream, slowing the spacecraft to just 200 mph by the time it reaches an altitude of 1.3 miles. Seven months after its launch from Cape Canaveral, the $2.4 billion rover, encased in a flying saucer-like aeroshell and protected by a blunt heat shield, will slam into the top of Mars' discernible atmosphere at 3:48 p.m. The 2,260-pound rover is the largest and most complex spacecraft ever sent to Mars.Īsked Wednesday what the odds might be for a successful landing, deputy project manager Matt Wallace said the sheer complexity of the 2,260-pound rover, the heaviest and most sophisticated ever sent to Mars, makes it difficult to predict. ![]() Mission managers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said that the spacecraft was healthy and flawlessly executing its final approach to Jezero Crater as it readied for a high-speed descent that engineers only half jokingly refer to as "seven minutes of terror." NASA's Perseverance Mars rover, seen during testing at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The mission is an unprecedented attempt to find signs of past microbial life at the site of an ancient Martian river, delta and lakebed. NASA's Perseverance Mars rover closed in on the red planet after a journey of 293 million miles, hurtling toward a nail-biting seven-minute descent to touchdown Thursday. Update: Perseverance landed successfully on Thursday - read the latest story here. NASA's Perseverance rover successfully lands on Mars 09:10
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