Chief engineer Adam Steltzner told CNN after the landing, "The team is overwhelmed with excitement and joy to have successfully landed another rover on the surface of Mars.
Perseverance moments before
touchdown on the Martian surface. When we do such investments, we do them for humanity, and we do them as a gesture of our humanity."
Steltzner was quick to remark on his team's contribution to some of humankinds most well known and disseminated images of the cosmos. Speaking about the breathtaking images sent back to Earth within just the first day, Steltzner added, "We can only hope, in our efforts to engineer spacecraft and explore our solar system, that we might be able contribute yet another iconic image to this collection, and I'm happy to say that I'm hopeful that today we can with this."
Perseverence touched down on a 3.9 billion year old lakebed within the Jezero Crater on February 18th, 2021 at not quite 4:00pm. The rover will examine and classify the different types of rocks it finds and seek out different types of minerals and the possibility of signs that life may have once existed on the red planet.
Perseverance's tread against the
rocky landscape.
After four years of leading over 450 scientists around the world in the pursuit of a single goal, deputy project scientist Katie Stack Morgan almost sounds humbled as so many years of work come to fruition and the results present themselves almost immediately.
One of these such minerals, olivine, is expected to be found in the conditions that Mars presents, and hopes are high that the mission will result in positively identifying this mineral on the surface. Morgan, explains, “That's a mineral that is very interesting to us. Thoughts are that this could be an explosive ash deposit deposit into Jezero Crater. On the other hand, we are in a lake basin and these could be lake sediments that we're seeing. Between us and the delta, we have a lot of interesting science to do. As soon as we got that color image from the surface of Mars, our chats lit up with the science team saying 'look over here' and 'look over here.' And that's exactly what we were hoping for. I can’t believe we’re doing science on the surface of Mars.”
Ingenuity, a helicoptor tucked underneath
Perseverance's main module.
On Friday Pauline Hwang, strategic mission manager, told reporters, “The rover is doing great and is healthy on the surface of Mars and continues to be highly functional and awesome.”
As mission manager Hwang will spearhead the next phase of Perseverance’s mission, which will be to asses it’s condition, functionality, and to determine the status of each of it’s instruments and components. Hwang explained that this will involve extending the mast which will expose more cameras to provide panorama viewscapes.
Tucked underneath the rover is it’s celestial companion, Ingenuity, a helicopter designed to carryout a series of test flights over a month’s time. This too will undergo a series of checkups to make sure it is in ‘flight ready’ condition.
The landing spot (centered) surrounded in
red by designated 'mission kill zones'.
While the actual atmospheric entry can seem like the most harrowing part of the rover’s landing, the Martian surface can be just as treacherous with the vast majority of it considered ‘kill zones’ for landing a pieces of equipment such as this. Perseverance not only had to withstand the trials of atmospheric entry, but the slightest miscalculation on the actual landing site could end in complete mission failure.
True to form, with the help of countless engineers, scientists, artist, mathematicians, and so many more that go in to making something as monumental as this happen, Perseverance dropped down on the ‘little blue map dot’ exactly as planned.
Are the missions to Mars money well spent? Will we be watching the first human landing on Mars within our lifetime? Let us know what you think in the comments below.
WRITTEN AND EDITED BY Silek
it'll be great to see the science we get from perseverance and ingenuity
