“You know the greatest danger facing us is ourselves, and irrational fear of the unknown. There is no such thing as the unknown. Only things temporarily hidden, temporarily not understood.” – James T. Kirk, “Star Trek: The Corbomite Maneuver”

By Mary O’Keefe

The one constant in human nature is the spirit of exploration. Considering what America has coped with lately, specifically the pandemic and political unrest, among the things learned is the importance of science and how it will propel us into the future.

The Perseverance rover, part of the Mars 2020 mission, will be landing on the surface of Mars on Feb. 18 at about 12:30 p.m. PST. Perseverance was named by seventh grader Alexander Mather of Lake Braddock Secondary School in Virginia, who submitted the winning entry to NASA’s name the rover contest.

“Three weeks, one day and about 49 minutes away, but who’s counting?” said Ray Baker, Mars 2020 Flight System manager at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, of when the landing is expected.

Although those at JPL may make traveling to Mars look easy, it is anything but. It is a certainty that everyone involved in the Mars 2020 mission will be dealing with some anxiety as the spacecraft gets closer to its red planet destination, and the all-important landing.

“This is not an easy thing,” Baker said. “It’s actually kind of a crazy, and amazing, thing that we are doing.”

There are so many things that have to go right for the rover to land on Mars and Baker said he is confident in all the preparatory work that has been done for the Feb. 18 landing.

“But Mars gets a vote in this,” he said.

JPL has managed several successful missions to Mars but that does not mean that workers rest on the successes of the past; not only do the engineers have to design a spacecraft to fly over 100 million miles, and then land in a specific location on Mars, but they also have to take into consideration the weather on the destination planet.

“Anytime you are hitting another planet, going something like 12,000 miles per hour, [and] we are going to build up temperatures on the heat shield of 1600 Celsius, that’s over 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, it is a scary proposition [that should] not to be taken lightly,” he said.

The rover will land using the sky crane process used for Curiosity, which landed in 2012 and continues to explore the surface of Mars.

The sky crane maneuver begins as the spacecraft nears the surface. The landing will be controlled by thrusters, the rover connected to a descent stage will be lowered onto the surface by cables and an “umbilical” that provides a power and communication connection. Once the rover is on the surface, it communicates this to the descent stage.

“Think of it like a puppeteer controlling its space puppet down to [the surface],” Baker said.

Then it is a step-by-step process. The rover communicates it is on the ground, the bridal/umbilical is cut, and the descent craft flies away just like with Curiosity.

“We’ve done it before, landed like this before, exactly once. And what we say a lot is ‘one in a row is not a trend,’” he added.

So although engineers are learning from the past they are not taking anything for granted, and continue to scrutinize every detail.

Once the rover is safely on the ground there will be a bit of housekeeping done to make sure the rover is safe after its long journey. One of the first things the rover will do is deploy a remote sensing mast, which looks like a head on the rover.

“We have two ways of talking to the rover. One is with a high gain antenna … that is direct [communication] to Earth,” Baker said. “The other way is called the UHF link and it actually talks to the orbiters currently orbiting Mars. Then those transmissions get relayed back through those orbiters.”

This will give many opportunities for the rover to communicate with Earth.

Communication is not immediate with the rover. On Feb. 18, it will take about 23 minutes for a signal sent from Earth to be received by the rover and then for the JPL team to see its response.

Mars 2020 will search for signs of ancient microbial life, characterize the planet’s geology and climate, collect carefully selected and documented rock and sediment samples for possible return to Earth, and pave the way for human exploration beyond the Moon.

Perseverance will also ferry a separate technology experiment to the surface of Mars – a helicopter named Ingenuity, the first aircraft to fly in a controlled way on another planet, according to the JPL website.

In addition, this will be the first phase of collecting samples of the Martian surface to be returned to Earth. After it is determined Perseverance rover is safe and functioning on Mars, Baker will be focusing on the mission to retrieve those samples.

“One part of this rover’s [mission] is a sample and caching system. It is a first for the Mars program, a subsystem specifically designed to collect samples, store them in sample tubes and drop them off on the surface of Mars,” he said.

The samples will then be retrieved and returned to Earth with the next Mars mission.

Although JPL may be looking toward the future it has not forgotten the present, and has had to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic like others on Earth.

“It has been a mission like no other because of the pandemic,” Baker said. “We were very fortunate to even launch.”

Most of JPL staff has been working off-lab, which like other businesses has not been easy to transfer to a virtual schedule. And viewing the landing will be different as well. There won’t be the typical views of Mission Control where every seat is filled as the engineers and scientists count down the landing, and of course passing around a jar of lucky peanuts, a tradition at JPL since 1964.

Baker will be watching the landing on Feb. 18 from his home with his children who are remote learning.

Those who are continuing working on the Mars 2020 mission will be on Martian time and their schedules vary. According to the schedule, Baker is supposed to be sleeping at the time of the landing.

“I assure you I will not be asleep,” he said. “I probably won’t get much sleep that day.”

There are many ways NASA/JPL has arranged for the public to participate in the Mars 2020 mission including watching the landing online. For information, visit mars.nasa.gov.