Mars rover landing - as it happened: Nasa Perseverance rover sends back first pictures from successful landing

Reuters reports on a village that has an unexpected connection to today’s mission:

Schoolchildren in the Bosnian village of Jezero waited with great excitement for an attempt by nasa on Thursday to land on an ancient lake bed on Mars which is named after their tiny hometown.

NASA‘s Mars rover Perseverance, the most advanced astrobiology lab ever flown to another world, is due to make a landing attempt on the ancient lake bed after a seven-month journey from Earth. Scientists hope to find signs of fossilized microbial life.

Before students are due to watch the historic landing live on video beam in their school courtyard, they are planning to hold a friendly volleyball match between sides called “Planet Earth” and “Planet Mars”.

“This time we’ll cheer for the Planet Mars,” joked Snezana Ruzicic, the mayor of the Jezero municipality in western Bosnia.

Jezero, which means lake in most Slavic languages, had been chosen as a name by NASA because it shares similar geological characteristics to the vast, rocky crater at the edge of a remnant river delta, which was carved into the red planet billions of years ago.

When the town, home to just over 1,000 people, learned about this in 2018, everyone found it “very, very positive and also odd news”, said Ruzicic, who had then checked the information through the U.S. Embassy in Bosnia and established links with Nasa.

Seven months ago, Jezero’s schoolchildren watched the launch of the Mars rover from Earth.

“They were thrilled and joyful and drew their visions of the Mars in the streets,” Ruzicic told Reuters in a telephone interview.

She hopes that excitement about the Mars exploration will put her tiny town on the map.

“Through the Mars rover’s both launching and landing we’ve got a free promotion of our town,” Ruzicic said. “Now we need investment for Jezero to stay on and survive.”

Mission control is playing host to a particularly fitting visitor today: a fluffy version of the dog from the This Is Fine meme.

With less than an hour to go, mission controllers are speaking to each other before the EDL – entry, descent and landing – team begin their work properly.

They note that it is a very unusual landing, and that it’s not even been clear that everyone has been in the same room at the same time during the lead-up to the launch. Some staff are still working from home over the internet.

And it’s not only the pandemic that has made things difficult. They also had to deal with an earthquake that hit just 20 minutes before the spacecraft was due to take off.

The EDL team also thank the cruise team for all the work they’ve done guiding the spacecraft to Mars over the months it has taken. “Thanks for literally and figuratively putting us in the place to succeed.”

If you’d like to watch along, you can do so on Independent TV – everything you need is here.

The transmitter that has been sending messages back to Earth is about to get switched off, meaning that the complex digital information it has been sending back will stop coming.

Instead, Nasa will be relying on tones, which it likens to a “flashlight” – still a signal coming back from the rover, but just a simple one telling us that it’s still around, rather than the more complex digital one that gives engineers more rich information.

The Perseverance rover has been carried over its almost 300-million-mile journeyby the cruise stage, that is the spacecraft that has taken it through space, ensuring that it safely travels through space and is pointing the right way.

But they have now split apart, ready for the entry into the atmosphere and the descent down before landing.

The vehicle is now on its own, turning itself towards Mars and ready to drop into the atmosphere.

Those “tones” that are coming back from the spacecraft just cut out for a moment, which happened because the cruise stage moved between the vehicle and Earth. So the two have presumably separated safely.

The vehicle is now warming up the entry thrusters that will stop it spinning and push it towards Mars ready for its perilous journey.

The vehicle is now going to be like a “bullet”, Nasa notes – everything goes very quickly from here, as the spacecraft hurtles towards Mars.

In about six minutes, it will enter the atmosphere – the beginning of those “seven minutes of terror”. The spacecraft will go very fast through the atmosphere, heating up and undergoing the first of its big challenges as its heat shield protects it from those blazing temperatures.

The spacecraft will also go quiet during this time, and even the “heartbeat tones” will switch off at points, because they won’t be able to make it through the hot plasma.

(Again, it’s worth remembering that we’re on a delay of over 11 minutes – that’s caused by the time it takes for the messages to make it through space.)

Here’s a Nasa illustration that shows how that process of hurtling into the atmosphere and decelerating should look:

The seven minutes of terror have begun.

Perseverance has crossed into the atmosphere, and is now flying down towards Mars. The seven most dangerous minutes of its mission have now begun.

(The “atmospheric entry” is a somewhat arbitrary part of the sky, but it does denote the point at which everything gets more dangerous.)

Perseverance is decelerating in the friction of the atmosphere, undergoing about 10 Gs. It’s also doing manuevres in the air to ensure that it lands at the right place.

The signal is cutting out because of the intense heat and plasma that is surrounding it as it flies through the atmosphere.