Perseverance arrived on Mars to look for traces of life

On the night of Thursday to Friday, February 19, NASA successfully landed the Perseverance rover (rover) on Mars. The significance of this success is that after it it will be very difficult for the United States to abandon the Mars program - first in the form of automatic delivery of collected samples, and then manned missions.

What happened

Launched in July 2020, Perseverance landed on the surface of Mars on the move late on February 18, Moscow time.

Landing on the Red Planet is difficult due to its rarefied atmosphere, which both requires thermal protection and does not allow effective aerodynamic braking. Therefore, American rovers land by landing module with powerful braking engines, which lowers the device to the surface on cables. Due to the signal delay from Mars, landing can only be automatic, which gives the famous “7 minutes of horror”, when it is known that the process has already begun, but it cannot be somehow influenced. What happened in these minutes at NASA, you can see here .

on the Perseverance Twitter account The landing went smoothly, and the first photos from the surface have already appeared . This is the region of the Jezero crater, promising for the search for traces of life: scientists are sure that billions of years ago it was filled with water and a river flowed into it. The planned mission time is one Martian year or two Earth years, but the experience of the previous Curiosity rover can be expected to be significantly exceeded.

The rover was immediately congratulated at the highest level - US President Joe Biden called the landing "another proof of the limitless potential of science and American ingenuity," and Google made an Easter egg in search results for mission-related queries - fireworks.

Mars orbit , launched in the same launch window with the American one - the Arab orbital station Hope and the Chinese Tianwen-1, whose program also provides for the landing of the rover. Now there are two more vehicles in

What's next

The main difference between the Perseverance mission is not only that its main goal is to search for traces of life on Mars, but also that it is firmly linked to future flights (which could not be said about Curiosity, which has been working on Mars since 2012). Firstly, the rover will collect samples for delivery to Earth by the next vehicle, and secondly, it will study the possibility of producing oxygen from the Martian atmosphere for future manned missions.

If Perseverance successfully collects promising samples, they will be delivered to Earth for analysis by the Mars Sample Return Campaign mission , the vehicles for which will be launched in the 2026 window. The complexity of this task will require the cooperation of the European Space Agency, which will make a Martian orbiter to intercept the rocket with samples and send them to Earth.

NASA is currently planning a manned flight to Mars for 2033. But its timing critically depends on the progress of the Artemis project to return people to the moon. True, Elon Musk promised to deliver people to Mars in 2026, but judging by the current underperformance of the Starship program, this is unlikely to happen.