With microphones on board: “Perseverance” should land in the crater of Mars

Thursday, February 18, 2021

With microphones on board
Presumably, “Perseverance” will land in the crater of Mars

It has been nine years since NASA’s Curiosity spacecraft, NASA’s last spacecraft, landed on Mars. Now he must have a company. ‘Perseverance’ is more technically complicated – it even has a small helicopter in its luggage.

About six months into the flight, the US “persevering” spacecraft is scheduled to land on Mars today. The NASA robot, which was launched at the end of July 2020 from the Cape Canaveral spaceport, is supposed to land at around 9:30 pm CET with a risky maneuver in a dry lake called “Jezero Crater” that has not been examined at the site. .

“Perseverance” can be translated into German as “staying power”. The NASA spacecraft was designed and built for about $ 2.5 billion for eight years, and is now supposed to look for traces of past microbial life on Mars, as well as to research the climate and geology of the planet. On board, the robot weighing nearly 1,000 kilograms the size of a small car has 7 scientific instruments, 23 cameras and a laser, among other things.

The rover should enable many of NASA’s first shows: For the first time, microphones are being sent to Mars with “perseverance”, for the first time a small helicopter, and for the first time samples are being returned to Earth from Mars in a mission developed jointly with the European Space Agency Isa.

If “perseverance” lands, the fifth spacecraft that NASA brings to Mars – most recently in 2012, “Curiosity”. Overall, less than half of all Mars missions launched around the world have been successful so far. Last week, space probes from the United Arab Emirates and then China succeeded in orbiting the planet. “Hope,” the Emirati investigation, is not supposed to land Landing of the Chinese “Tianwen 1” spaceship It is planned in two to three months.