By Mary O’KEEFE

On Feb. 18, Mars 2020 Perseverance successfully landed on the surface of Mars and the photos coming back from the Red Planet are impressive to say the least.

The landing was picture perfect as cameras aboard the lander and the rover documented everything from the parachute deployment to the “umbilical” cord being cut from the lander. But years before the landing hundreds of engineers, scientists and administrators worked long days to make certain the landing the world saw was successful.

“Getting to Mars is hard,” said Dr. Marc Rayman, chief engineer for Mission Operations at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, during a virtual landing watch party with Congressman Adam Schiff on Feb. 18.

The virtual event included students from Glendale, Burbank and Los Angeles unified school districts. The students were able to ask questions during the event.

Perseverance will be exploring the geology of Mars at its landing area of Jezero Crater, the site of an ancient river delta. It will assess ancient habitability, look for signs of ancient life specifically in rocks known to preserve signs of life over time, demonstrate technology for future robotic and human exploration and gather rock and soil samples that will be part of a return mission to Earth in the future.

This mission has some firsts that are game changers when it comes to exploration. During the landing there were not only cameras to record the landing but also a microphone on the rover to record the first audio sounds from Mars.

From the moment of parachute inflation, the camera system covered the entirety of the descent process, showing some of the rover’s intense ride to Mars’ Jezero Crater. The footage from high-definition cameras aboard the spacecraft starts seven miles [11 kilometers] above the surface, showing the supersonic deployment of the most massive parachute ever sent to another world, and ends with the rover’s touchdown in the crater, according to a JPL statement.

“A microphone attached to the rover did not collect usable data during the descent, but the commercial off-the-shelf device survived the highly dynamic descent to the surface and obtained sounds from Jezero Crater on Feb. 20,” stated JPL.

The audio was between 10 and 60 seconds and captured the sound of a Martian breeze, along with the sounds of the working rover.

The event was emotional for many of those who worked on the project. Images shared showed engineers and scientists from all over the world watching as the landing was executed, first cheering then catching their breath as the reality of success washed over them.

“For those who wonder how you land on Mars – or why it is so difficult – or how cool it would be to do so – you need to look no further,” said acting NASA Administrator Steve Jurczyk.

“This video of Perseverance’s descent is the closest you can get to landing on Mars without putting on a pressure suit,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science.

Mars’ photos began arriving at JPL a little over 200 seconds after the spacecraft entered Mars’ upper atmosphere.

Key hardware on the rover include Mastcam-Z, an advanced camera system with panoramic and stereoscopic imaging capability with the ability to zoom, SuperCam, an instrument that can provide imaging, chemical composition analysis and mineralogy at a distance, Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry, an X-ray fluorescence spectrometer and high-resolution imager to map the fine-scale Martian surface materials, Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals (SHERLOC), a spectrometer that will provide fine-scale mineralogy and organic compounds – SHERLOC is the first UV Raman spectrometer to fly to the surface of Mars, Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, technology to produce oxygen from Martian atmospheric carbon dioxide, Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer, a set of sensors to provide measurements of temperature, wind speed and direction, pressure, relative humidity and dust size and shape and Radar Imager for Mars’ Subsurface Experiment, a ground-penetrating radar.

Another first will be the Ingenuity Mars helicopter, which checked in with JPL mission control after Perseverance landed. The data received indicated that both the helicopter, which will remain attached to the rover for 30 to 60 days, and its base station, an electrical box on the rover that stores and routes communications between the rotorcraft and Earth, are operating as expected, according to JPL.

“After Perseverance deploys Ingenuity to the surface, the helicopter will then have a 30-Martian-day (31-Earth-day) experimental flight test window. If Ingenuity survives its first bone-chilling Martian nights – when temperatures dip as low as minus 130 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 90 degrees Celsius) – the team will proceed with the first flight of an aircraft on another world,” stated JPL.

“I just think it’s so neat that after over eight years of working on this, and after more than six months of traveling through interplanetary space, we now have this incredibly cool rover. It represents all of us. It’s our eyes and ears,” Rayman said.

“To see those brilliant scientists and engineers applauding the safe landing, and those first images … it’s just so incredibly exciting,” said Congressman Adam Schiff. “It just makes us all feel like explorers, like we are all part of the journey.”