NASA's rover Perseverance is hurling to Mars since its launch on July 30 2020 (see this Zapread post). It will land tonight at 21:44 CET, meaning 11 minutes later, we should receive signal from a safe rover on the surface of Mars.
The Perseverance rover is very similar at first sight to the Curiosity rover that landed in August 2012. The design of the main body and driving system is the same, but a whole bunch of details are new, for example:
- The payload contains a system to test out In-Situ Resource Utilisation: if it works, this system will create oxygen filtered out of the minute concentration of oygen in the Martian atmosphere
- A 6 cm drill is on-board which can take samples and store them in a cache. When this cache is filled, it will be left in a place where in the 2030s, the Mars Sample Return mission will retrieve it and send it back to Earth for further research.
- A small helicopter called Ingenuity is on-board which can be deployed to scout the surroundings of the rover
- Some black & white 2 Megapixel cameras onboard have been upgraded to full-colour 20 Megapixel cameras, and many more cameras are added
- Because of the sharp Mars rocks, the wheels of Curiosity teared down faster than expected. So new, bigger kicks are on!
Watch the NASA livefeed tonight!
That was such an amazing event. Wow.
It's hard to grasp just how big that thing is. It's big.
Yes it was! Literally a blast! I am really a cheerleader of SpaceX, the only thing I don't believe is that such a rocket is going to replace transatlantic airplane flights.
I don't think it will replace flights - but the wealthy may use it to do 30 minute hops to the other side of the world. It will be hyperloop for the rest of us peons.
Imagine a hyperloop from Asia to USA. 4000-7000 km/h. Make the trip in under 2 hours. And no more polluting marine containerships. Wow.
But I wonder if on average you will really safe time. It is not an airplane that you can top of with kerosene, and then wait for 0.5 hour and then go. The fueling of cryogenic O2 and CH4 is a meticulous process that will never become similar to topping an airplane of with kerosene. If one valve gets stuck in the rocket or in the fueling GSE, and they do that all the time at cryogenic temperatures, you have an instant delay of a few hours, and away is your time saving.