'Seven minutes of terror': NASA's Perseverance will endure a peak heating of 2,370F as it travels 12,000mph through the Mars' atmosphere before landing on the surface next week
- NASA's Perseverance rover is set to land on Mars February 18
- However, it will endure 'seven minutes of terror' as it descends to the surface
- There will be no communication between the rover and NASA as it lands
- This is because radio signals to and from the rover take 10 minutes to travel
- NASA says that it is possible that the landing could be unsuccessful NASA’s Perseverance rover is set to reach Mars in less than a week, but before it touches down on the Martian surface it will endure a harrowing ‘seven minutes of terror.’
Radio signals sent from NASA and vice versa travel take 10 minutes for either party to make contact, so after the ground team tells Perseverance to descend, the rover takes over and will make the epic journey completely alone.
The spacecraft will shoot through Mars’ atmosphere moving at 12,000 miles per hour, but then must slow down to zero miles per hour seven minutes later in order to land safely on the surface.‘It is not guaranteed that we will be successful,’ Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said in a statement.
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NASA’s Perseverance rover is set to reach Mars in less than a week, but before it touches down on the Martian surface it will endure a harrowing ‘seven minutes of terror'
NASA launched Perseverance July 30 from Cape Canaveral Florida aboard a United Launch Alliances Atlas V rocket.
The six-wheeled vehicle, which is the same size as a large car, is also accompanied by an autonomous four pound (1.8kg) helicopter called Ingenuity which will study Mars's atmosphere.The rover is due to land on February 18, 2021 at the base of an 820-foot-deep (250 meters) crater called Jezero, a former lake which was home to water 3.5 billion years ago.
It will drill into Mars and collect geological specimens that will be cached across the planet and retrieved by a follow up mission around 2031.
NASA MARS 2020: THE MISSION WILL SEE THE PERSEVERANCE ROVER AND INGENUITY HELICOPTER SEARH FOR LIFE
NASA's Mars 2020 mission will search for signs of ancient life on on the Red Planet in a bid to help scientists better understand how life evolved on Earth.
Named Perseverance, the main car-sized rover will explore an ancient river delta within the Jezero Crater, which was once filled with a 1,600ft deep lake.
It is believed that the region hosted microbial life some 3.5 to 3.9 billion years ago and the rover will examine soil samples to hunt for evidence of the life.
Nasa's Mars 2020 rover (artist's impression) will search for signs of ancient life on Mars in a bid to help scientists better understand how life evolved on our own planet
The $2.5 billion (£1.95 billion) Mars 2020 spaceship launched on July 30 witht he rover and helicopter inside - and will land on February 18, 2021.
Perseverance is designed to land inside the crater and collect samples that will eventually be returned to Earth for further analysis.
A second mission will fly to the planet and return the samples, perhaps by the later 2020s in partnership with the European Space Agency.
This concept art shows the Mars 2020 rover landing on the red planet via NASA's 'sky-crane' system
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