EXPERT REACTION: Seven minutes of terror – NASA’s Perseverance rover lands on Mars

What a Ride! After a 480 million kilometre journey the Perseverance rover, or “Percy” has landed on Mars. Although the amazingly talented and exceptional engineers of NASA made this look easy this was certainly not the case. As an engineer and researcher in the field hypersonics, including planetary entry, I fully appreciate the challenges these engineers faced.

The first part of the landing was of course to survive the extreme environment of Martian entry, which like all high-speed planetary entry is a tricky and challenging engineering problem. To ensure “Percy” and Ingenuity made it to the surface they were safely housed behind the heat-shield which was there to prevent the extreme heat generated from the rapid deceleration from more than 5 km/s through the thin Martian atmosphere reaching the lander. This heatshield is designed to withstand the heat from both the frictional flow of travelling so fast and the gas radiation resulting from the entry itself.

The success of the heatshield meant that the remainder of the mission was possible, such as the parachute’s for further deceleration and of course the sky crane which finally delivered Perseverance to the surface – together with my, and my family’s names!

Today is a truly inspiring and amazing demonstration of the power of human ingenuity and of course engineers. I hope all the little girls and boys out there are as excited as me with this landing

Understanding Mars is like a complex puzzle. Each mission brings a new piece of evidence helping us to advance our understanding about Mars and the evolution of our solar system. 

The Perseverance rover is equipped with sophisticated instruments that will be searching for evidence of past life and habitable environments. It will also select samples to be brought to Earth in 2031 to be analysed with instruments that cannot be miniaturised and sent to Mars, such as powerful microscopes and particle accelerators.
 
I am at the edge of my seat to see what secrets are waiting to be discovery at the Jezero crater.

On our return from the Spaceport America Cup in 2019, we had the chance to stop over at NASA JPL and were lucky enough to see the Mars Perseverance Rover up close and personal during its final assembly and integration stage. It’s incredible to realise that the rover we just saw has landed on a whole other planet. As students in Australia, we are at an exciting point in history as the growth of our own space industry begins to accelerate and we look forward to the contributions that we can make on a global level.

The safe passage of the NASA/JPL Mars 2020 mission through the Martian atmosphere, culminating in the successful landing of the Perseverance rover on the surface of Mars, is an amazing achievement and a tribute to all of the talented engineering team who made it happen and made it look so easy. It wasn’t. The dynamic extremes of the atmospheric entry, the descent heating and the tightly choreographed ballet of the entry and descent systems, the sky-crane and finally the rover on their way to the surface of the Red Planet will have truly induced 'seven minutes of terror' in these dedicated engineers as well as all of the planetary scientists their hard work is supporting.

In fact, that goes for all of the millions of us around the world who were watching and cheering 'Percy' on to a safe landing. Planetary entry is never easy, especially when trying to use the thin Martian atmosphere to decelerate from the incredible approach speeds on arrival at Mars. All of that extreme energy of motion had to be transferred away from the vehicle to bring it to a safe stand-still on the surface.

Firstly, by the critical heat shield use to absorb and discard the massive frictional heating during the high-speed hypersonic descent through the upper atmosphere, then by the parachutes to further decelerate its fall and finally by the retro rockets of the sky-crane to initiate a soft touch down. It was all calculated, modelled, tested, and no doubt endlessly iterated for years by the NASA/JPL team. And finally, it just worked as designed! That is what great engineering is all about. Well done!

The successful landing of NASA's Perseverance rover on Mars today represents a significant step in answering a question of primary human interest: is there any other life in our solar system, or is Earth the only habitat where the genesis of life has occurred in the past 4 billion years?

We know that the landing site, the Jezero crater, was once a lake filled with water, and consequently microbial lifeforms may have evolved within it. Those lifeforms might even persist to this day in the crater's clay deposits.

Perseverance is well named, since we need to be persistent to fully answer the life genesis question this decade, but this goal is well within our technology capabilities and it would be useful for Australia to assist in this broad effort.

NASA’s landing on Mars is an awesome and audacious achievement, as complex and unique as the most difficult of robotic space missions.

This is the first in a series of missions that will ultimately culminate in the return of samples from the red planet.

This is a rare opportunity for Australians to develop experience building and operating hardware in deep space with our partners at NASA.

It is fantastic to learn about another successful mission landing on Mars. Perseverance will continue the legacy of past missions and will look for signs of ancient life in a new area of Mars. What is pretty amazing and very new is that this mission will collect and store a sample of Mars’ surface, that will eventually be sent back to Earth. I am very much looking forward to the development of new tech to be used in Mars exploration, and seeing the Mars Helicopter, Ingenuity, make its first flight.

Congrats to NASA and all the folks that made this landing possible.

The ability to move on ground and fly freely is crucial for human space exploration. While we are all curious about fundamental findings and how the new world looks like, we finally cannot sustain such investigations without gathering resources, which support human presence. Sampling of rock probes is the first step in space mining; it is called exploration (of a mining site). We may discover new minerals and we certainly will find minerals which are considered as unmineable on Earth. Scoping the Martian environment will help us to invent new equipment and methods which are tailored to the problem – the proliferation of the ‘unmineable’.

In this sense, we may integrate processes as nature in its cells does. This can form an enormous driving force. Renewable energies (sunlight or cosmic radiation) may be combined with space mining and space farming to form a closed circular environment life-support system. On Earth, we are assembling parts, in space we need compartmented assemblies. This is a change in mindset, and we may better start now with it. This can spawn new economic systems, and the post-Covid world on Earth needs local, resilient and self-sustaining manufacturing; alike what is needed on a harsh environment such as Mars.

This is an amazing achievement by our colleagues at NASA JPL – to send a spacecraft more than 400 million km on a journey to Mars and land it on the surface without a hitch. It’s a credit to the experts who have worked on Perseverance for a decade, and have once again demonstrated the power of science and technology. Perseverance will expand our scientific knowledge of Mars, looking for signs of past life on the planet, and its successful landing is inspiration for all of us. 

CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, is proud to work with our colleagues at NASA JPL, managing the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex on their behalf. Our team at CDSCC has been supporting the mission since its launch from Earth in July 2020 and will continue to support it throughout its time exploring Mars.

The successful landing of the Perseverance rover on Mars is the culmination of an exciting ten days that witness the successful arrival at Mars of a fleet of three robotic spacecraft fr4om the UAE, China and the US.

The Perseverance rover mission will explore a former river delta that formed in an ancient lake in Jezero crater. This will not only provide information about a new location on Mars, it will also help us understand the early history of the planet when it’s surface was much more Earth-like than at present, and help define whether or not life could have lived there. The mission will also collect samples for future return to Earth in the latter part of this decade by a joint NASA and ESA mission under development.

Perseverance will also test a small Mars helicopter called Ingenuity, which will be the first powered aircraft to fly on another planet. Ingenuity has the potential for scouting sites to be visited by the rover and will demonstrate the potential of such drones to explore difficult to access locations and support other missions.  

Lastly, Perseverance carries an experiment called MOXIE that will manufacture oxygen, demonstrating technology that will support future crewed missions to Mars.

This morning in Australia we all woke up to the news that Mars 2020 has successfully landed the Perseverance rover in Mars' Jezero Crater. 

Perseverance will spend its time on Mars searching for signs of ancient life and gathering samples which will hopefully one day be returned to Earth.

This is a major achievement for both NASA and humanity. It is the next step towards further exploration of the red planet and brings us closer to a human visit in the coming decades.

Jezero Crater is rocky and dangerous and Mars 2020 required very precise navigation to land the one tonne, car sized Perseverance rover in a safe place in the crater. This was the most ambitious landing site of any Mars mission, however, the chance of finding signs of the life in Jezero Crater was seen as worth the risk.

To survive Martian entry at 21,000 km/h into an atmosphere which is 100 times thinner than Earth’s and then land accurately and safely, Mars 2020 had to endure what NASA engineers call the “seven minutes of terror. 

State-of-the-art technology is used to ensure survival. This includes specialist materials to protect the spacecraft and its cargo from entry heating, real-time guidance software and hardware to ensure accurate landing, a machine vision system to survey the surface of Mars in-real time to ensure that Perseverance lands in a safe location in Jezero crater, and a final 'skycrane' manoeuvre which slowly drops Perseverance down to the Martian surface.

I am hugely excited as the frontier of space and what it offers in terms of knowledge is massive. From a personal point of view I have always been curious with what is beyond Earth, and I am thrilled to be part of this field of science that asks questions that have fascinated humankind since we came to be…are we alone in the universe?

This mission will look for potential biosignatures that may have been preserved on Mars. We are testing for evidence of past life - and the implications on any such discovery would have a profound impact on our understanding of our place in the universe.

And for the first time any promising samples will be prepped for possible future sample return missions to Earth. To be able to analyse samples in greater detail with instrumentation on Earth (perhaps novel technologies not invented yet) would open up a whole new sphere of potential discovery.  

There will also be microphones on the rover so it will be the first time we will be able to ‘hear’ what is going on on another planet. How cool is that.

I was out of breath ‘watching’ the landing. And now we have touchdown. We lit the candle back at launch last year, and now the torch has been passed. Time for Percy to have its own light show on the red planet. And maybe a stepping stone for humans to have their dance on Mars.

The safe arrival of NASA’s Perseverance rover in Mar’s Jezero crater marks the end of its seven-month journey to the red planet and the start of some important research.

Perseverance is the 9th spacecraft NASA has sent to land on Mars but is the first to specifically look for signs of life. The rover has four science objectives; looking for habitability, seeking biosignatures, catching samples and preparing for humans.

Perseverance has specialised equipment on board, including the first Mars helicopter – a technology demonstration to test powered flight on another world. It will be the first time in human history that this test will take place, sometime in the next few weeks.

The rover is also equipped with some microphones so that we can listen to the Martian winds – another first.

Closer to home, Aussie scientists are tracking the rover from the Deep Space Network complex in Canberra. The DSN has a direct link to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Los Angeles and took over operations of Perseverance an hour after landing.

In July 2020, NASA invited the world’s population to ‘check-in’ and submit their name for inclusion on Perseverance. 10.9 million tiny names are etched onto silicon chips on board Perseverance, labelled as ‘Explorers’.

As a scientist collaborating with NASA's InSight mission already on the surface of Mars, I am not only excited about the Mars2020 mission, but how its arrival may help us learn more about Mars' atmosphere and subsurface.

We will be listening with InSight's seismometer for any sonic booms in the atmosphere, and for the possible marsquake triggered by the two weights (CMBDs) dropped early in the landing sequence. This will help us better calibrate our instrument, and deepen our understanding about the surface structure.

The mission of Mars2020 in search for microbial life in Jezero Crater is extremely exciting for planetary scientists. Especially given that a little piece of Australia will be landing on the surface of Mars to help with the puzzle.

It is fantastic to see the successful landing of the Perseverance Rover!  This is the first step in an ambitious goal, planned for more than a decade, to bring samples from Mars to Earth. We hope that Australian researchers will be in a position to examine those precious samples, like we analysed the samples from the Moon missions 50 years ago.

With Perseverance we have entered a unique moment in our history. Perseverance is the first mission to carry a science suite that is complete enough to definitively detect past or extant life. From this point on, any given day, we can be woken up with the news that there is compelling evidence for life on another planet.

Over 1000 industry partners contributed to Perseverance. Just one marker demonstrating how an inspirational mission with a compelling science case, combining pure and applied research with engineering, can generate jobs and growth.

"The successful touchdown of NASA’s Perseverance rover on the surface of Mars is truly a game-changer in our exploration of the red planet. With the search for evidence of ancient microbial life its primary mission, the rover breaks new ground in being the first step in bringing soil and rock samples back to Earth from Mars. And its Ingenuity helicopter drone will make humankind’s first attempts at airborne flight on another world. Absolutely amazing stuff – watch this space!

Woohoo! What more can you say about another successful landing on the surface of Mars.

The entire team of scientists, engineers and programmers who have dedicated the last decade to this mission are the heroes today. Along with our brilliant teams at the Deep Space Network who maintained signal lock through Perseverance’s ‘seven minutes of terror’ as it descended toward the surface of Mars – the unsung heroes of space exploration for this mission and dozens of others exploring the solar system and beyond.

Today, our CSIRO team at the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex will continue two-way radio contact with Perseverance as it begins its journey on Mars.

Today’s landing by the Perseverance rover marks the beginning of the first dedicated life sciences mission on Mars. It’s instruments will unlock the secrets contained in the ancient dry river delta inside Jezero Crater. An instrument called PIXL, led by Australian astrobiologist, Dr Abigail Allwood will hopefully reveal the structures that indicate past bacterial life that may have gained a foothold in Jezero when it was a lake on Mars two billion years ago.

Congratulations to NASA on the successful landing of the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover in the Jezero Crater. What was once science fiction is now a reality and we applaud NASA for continuing to inspire the global community with this exciting mission that could potentially unlock the wonders of space.

The Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex will be playing an important role in assisting the mission through its world-class tracking facilities – as it has done for NASA’s missions for decades. The Australian Space Agency looks forward to working closely with NASA on future missions to the Moon and beyond in the years ahead.

This mission is an essential component of humankind's exploration and understanding of the fundamental science of the universe. In order to pave the way for human expansion into the solar system and beyond, we must gain 'ground truth' scientific observations of soil and rock components, structure and search for evidence of ancient life.

The Perseverance Rover along with the Mars Helicopter technology demonstration will help continue to build technologies and expand scientific knowledge which can be used to accelerate human space exploration in the future. The fundamental knowledge from this mission will be utilised for future missions that bring humans to the surface of Mars to establish a permanent human presence on Mars.

Perseverance is our best chance to detect signs of life on Mars in decades. This mission builds on years of exploration that showed Mars was once far more habitable than it is today, but Perseverance can show whether it was inhabited. It won’t be easy and almost certainly any detection will need a follow up confirmation, but now it’s safely landed there’s a chance this rover could uncover those signs of life on the red planet.
 
Perseverance will take samples of the Martian soil for a possible return to Earth by a future mission. These samples are the only way to confirm the presence of life whether it’s living today, or long since extinct. Getting these samples back to Earth is an insanely challenging project but Perseverance is the start of that historic undertaking, and such an exciting signal for the next generation as this effort will take decades.
 
Also there’s a small drone helicopter called Ingenuity onboard, making it the first helicopter on an alien world and if successful will definitely not be the last! That’s because the ability to fly wherever you want, at great speed, for a close up-view although without risk of damage from collision or fall, is a thrilling capability to imagine for future missions.

This is another spectacular achievement from NASA and its collaborators to understand if life ever flourished on Mars, and through next generation technology, such as flying the first helicopter (!) and producing Oxygen in the CO2 atmosphere, will pave the way for humans to eventually live sustainably on our neighbouring planet.