{"id":22410,"date":"2021-03-07T22:37:39","date_gmt":"2021-03-07T14:37:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stuif.com\/blog\/?p=22410"},"modified":"2022-07-06T12:58:07","modified_gmt":"2022-07-06T04:58:07","slug":"perseverance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stuif.com\/blog\/?p=22410","title":{"rendered":"Perseverance"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Are you staying up tonight?<\/strong><\/em>, a friend asked me a few weeks ago. No, why?<\/em><\/strong> , I replied. He knows about my interest in space travel and expected that I was aware of the landing of a spacecraft on Mars that night. But I was not \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I checked the timing, the Perseverance would land at 4:55 am in the morning of 19 February (Malaysian time). In this blog I will explain why I decided to enjoy my sleep and check the next morning if the landing had been successful \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2018 I wrote a blog Landing on Mars<\/a>, in which I described the various Mars missions, concentrating on the Curiosity Mission of 2012. The procedure to land the Curiosity was new, using a so-called sky-crane for the last phase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here is a diagram of what is called the Entry, Descent and Landing (EDL) process. The spacecraft enters the (thin) Martian atmosphere with a velocity of ~ 20.000 km\/h. About 7 minutes later it must land on the surface with a velocity of less than 1 m\/s. As signals between Earth and Mars take about 11 minutes, EDL can not be controlled from Earth, the whole process must have been programmed in the computers on board. Mission Control can only wait and see. That’s why these 7 minutes have been called the seven minutes of terror. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In my 2018 blog I describe the three phases in more detail, here is an very informative animation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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