On Thursday morning, NASA is scheduled to launch its new Mars rover, Perseverance, on a six-month journey to the Red Planet. The car-sized rover will be boosted into space atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket departing from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It’s the third and final Mars mission to depart Earth this summer; earlier in July, China and the United Arab Emirates also launched their first Martian explorers.
Perseverance is essentially an alien-hunting self-driving car. It’s primary mission is to find possible signs of ancient life hidden in the Martian soil and bottle them up so they can be returned to Earth by another robotic mission later this decade. It’s NASA’s fifth Mars rover, but it will also represent a number of firsts for the agency. Perseverance will host the first microphone on Mars to capture the sounds of the rover’s descent to the surface; it will be the first rover to take pictures with a zoomable camera; it carries a super lightweight helicopter destined to become the first extraterrestrial aircraft; it’s the first rover powered by American plutonium; it’s carrying the first space suit samples for tests on another planet; and it will be the first rover to collect return samples of Mars dirt.
But before that happens, it has to get there. Once Perseverance is boosted into space, it will spend six months hurtling through the void enveloped in a white aeroshell that looks like a UFO. (It’s actually a pretty short trip; Mars and Earth get this close only once every 26 months.) The aeroshell was built by Lockheed Martin, which also built the capsules that have safely carried all of NASA’s robots to the surface of the Red Planet. “We’ve been building aeroshells since the 1970s, and we’re getting pretty good at it,” says Neil Tice, the Mars 2020 program manager at Lockheed Martin.
That experience will come to bear when Perseverance arrives on Mars next February, where it will face its biggest challenge yet: executing a precision landing. The rover’s descent sequence is known as the “seven minutes of terror” among NASA engineers, because that’s how long it takes for the rover to descend through the atmosphere. Along the way, a number of complicated maneuvers have to go exactly right so the $2.7 billion mission doesn’t go up in smoke.
Perseverance will enter the tenuous Martian atmosphere going more than 10,000 miles per hour, which means that as it slices through the air it will experience temperatures of nearly 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit. “The heat shield really takes the brunt of hitting the atmosphere,” says Tice of the lander’s protective structure. But if it works as it’s supposed to, inside its protective casing the rover and its sensitive equipment will never experience temperatures much warmer than a hot summer day in the desert. This is because the ablative heat shield dissipates heat as its layers are burned off.
The aeroshell fo
