Well, they can’t keep the power on down south in Texas today. But let’s see if good old yankee ingenuity can land another rover on Mars (CNN):
Landing day is finally here. The NASA Perseverance rover, which has been on a 292.5 million-mile journey from Earth since July 30, is expected to land on Mars Thursday around 3:55 p.m. ET.
Perseverance is NASA’s first mission that will search for signs of ancient life on another planet to help answer the big question: Was life ever present on Mars?
The rover will explore Jezero Crater, the site of an ancient lake that existed 3.9 billion years ago, and search for microfossils in the rocks and soil there. Follow-up missions will return samples of this site collected by Perseverance to Earth by the 2030s.
Along for the ride with Perseverance is an experiment to fly a helicopter, called Ingenuity, on another planet for the first time.
Live coverage begins streaming at 2:15 p.m. ET.
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory offers this simulation for how the landing is supposed to work after the “seven minutes of terror” between the lander entering the atmosphere and actually touching down. The signal travel time between Mars and Earth means mission specialists have no control over what happens during the sequence. The lander is on its own.
JPL veteran and glitteratti Mark Rober sets up landing day and provides some background on what Perseverance will do with its time on Mars. The “Poop, Scoop, and Shoot” part of the mission will in time return core samples to Earth for analysis that cannot be done on Mars.
I watched Ridley Scott’s The Martian (2015) again the other day. As a former engineer, all the “science the shit out of this” problem-solving (even the Hollywood stuff) and the improvized solutions have a real appeal for me. It’s what I used to do for clients in places like this (below).
Guess what I’ll be doing just before 4 p.m. ET?