Home » Perseverance is on Mars: here is the first photo sent

Perseverance is on Mars: here is the first photo sent

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NASA’s Perseverance rover has arrived on Mars. The rover has hit the ground and is ready to open a new page of space exploration. The mission is in fact destined to look for traces of past life and to collect the first samples of the Martian soil that in 2031 will be brought to Earth by a relay of missions in which Italy plays an important role. Here is the first photo sent to the NASA control center. The signal transmitted by the rover arrives on Earth only 11 minutes later due to the delay in communication between Mars and Earth, 230 million kilometers away.

The entry into orbit was followed by the control center at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Jpl) much less crowded than usual to ensure the distance imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic and the traditional ritual of sharing peanuts before an arrival on Mars it was replaced by a symbolic peanut consumed by the flight director.

The descent, through the atmosphere, to Mars is a very difficult and risky maneuver: only 40% of the attempts made so far have been successful. 80 seconds after entering the atmosphere, Perseverance faced a temperature of up to 1,300 degrees protected by a heat shield. 240 seconds after entering orbit, the parachute with a diameter of 21.5 meters opened, which further slowed down the run (which also reached a speed of 20,000 kilometers per hour) to just over 1.5 kilometers per hour when the vehicle was 11 kilometers from the Martian surface. 20 seconds after opening the parachute, the heat shield has separated from the rover and the latter will activate radar and cameras to detect the characteristics of the ground. At 20 meters above the ground and 12 seconds after landing, the descent stage to which the rover had been anchored all the time separated and let Perseverance descend very slowly, anchored to four cables 6.4 meters long each; meanwhile the rover has put its wheels in position to touch the ground.

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