New Wheels on Mars
Feb. 18th, 2021 08:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerThis year’s arrivals at Mars have been international, with an orbiter from the United Arab Emirates (launched by a Japanese rocket) and a Chinese orbiter and lander. Tianwen 1’s lander, as with the Viking landers of the 1970s, will spend some time orbiting Mars before being dropped off (which does raise a few unfortunate thoughts of “not being able to use any other country’s already-there orbiter as a relay”). The third probe to arrive at Mars this year, though, came straight in, and that might have increased my apprehension about what might happen to the Perseverance rover from the United States. Its “skycrane” drop-off system had been used before with the Curiosity rover, but some new modifications had been added and it is a complicated system for a complicated mission.
I tuned into the streaming coverage of the landing a while before the scheduled time of touchdown, hearing the reports of various critical phases light-minutes in the past. The rocket-powered drop-off itself didn’t take that long, but the update the rover had set down all right followed soon enough. With that relief offered, I stayed tuned in long enough for the first pictures from the surface, which seemed sort in between the “absolutely rock-littered” landscapes that had seemed a first default from the Vikings (and reinforced by Mars Pathfinder two decades later) and the sandier plains I’ve been noticing with later missions. It’s still early in the mission, of course, and I do keep coming to think how I come to take these Mars missions for granted (noticing just today how the InSight lander is still hanging on, although suffering from dust on its solar panels). I do want to try and see if I can notice news about the tiny helicopter attached to Perseverance, and if China can manage to put a long-working lander on the surface from another country at last. The sample tubes Perseverance is supposed to be filling will wait a lot longer before being picked up.
I tuned into the streaming coverage of the landing a while before the scheduled time of touchdown, hearing the reports of various critical phases light-minutes in the past. The rocket-powered drop-off itself didn’t take that long, but the update the rover had set down all right followed soon enough. With that relief offered, I stayed tuned in long enough for the first pictures from the surface, which seemed sort in between the “absolutely rock-littered” landscapes that had seemed a first default from the Vikings (and reinforced by Mars Pathfinder two decades later) and the sandier plains I’ve been noticing with later missions. It’s still early in the mission, of course, and I do keep coming to think how I come to take these Mars missions for granted (noticing just today how the InSight lander is still hanging on, although suffering from dust on its solar panels). I do want to try and see if I can notice news about the tiny helicopter attached to Perseverance, and if China can manage to put a long-working lander on the surface from another country at last. The sample tubes Perseverance is supposed to be filling will wait a lot longer before being picked up.