Here's how NASA will safely land a $2.7 billion rhino-sized rover in a dangerous Martian crater

An illustration shows the skycrane that will be responsible for gently depositing the giant rover on the Martian surface.

(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

When NASA's $2.7 billion Perseverance rover plunges like a meteor into the Martian atmosphere on Thursday (Feb. 18), it will put on a show unlike any before in the five-decade history of Red Planet exploration.

NASA is attempting to land the 2,260-pound (1,025 kilograms) nuclear-powered life-hunting robot — which will be moving at 12,100 mph (19,500 kph) when it smacks into the Martian atmosphere on Feb 18. — with unheard-of precision in an area of particularly treacherous terrain. To pull this off, the agency has designed an all-new system to safely deposit the rover on the surface, which will include turning the descent vehicle into a smart robotic pilot that will aim itself at a narrow target zone, scan the surface for dangers while moving at high speed, and — if all goes according to plan — guide itself to flat ground that won't damage the machine upon landing. And the whole undertaking will be filmed and beamed back to Earth for the public's viewing pleasure.

Mars landings are always dramatic. Probes from Earth, as Live Science previously reported, arrive at the speed of asteroids orbiting the sun, and they impact the Martian atmosphere at meteoric velocities. Pathfinder, the tiny robotic spacecraft that brought the first successful rover Sojourner to the Red Planet in 1997, survived the final stage of its descent in a cocoon of airbags, each as thick as an elephant. A similar cocoon helped deposit the much bigger and more advanced Opportunity rover on Mars in one piece in 2004. The Soviet Union, which first attempted to put a rover on Mars in 1971, relied on parachutes and foam. That spacecraft, named Mars 2, was destroyed upon landing.

But Perseverance was built to hunt for signs of life in the ancient river delta, dunes and boulder fields within the 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) Jezero crater. Imprecision isn't an option. Curiosity made the most precise landing in Mars history so far, and its landing zone was much wider than the one Perseverance is targeting. If Perseverance were to be as sloppy in its landing precision as Curiosity was, the rover could smash to bits against the side of a crater wall or wind up outside the crater, in a location where it might be difficult or impossible to reach its intended destination due to terrain.

Then, just 6,900 feet (2,100 m) above the surface, Perseverance will pop off its parachute, and a rocket-powered descent vehicle will handle the rest of the journey. Using variable thrusters located on the four corners of the vehicle, it will fire those rockets to navigate toward the landing spot chosen by the computers. If all goes well, the descent vehicle should have plenty of leeway: According to NASA, the vehicle can shift the rover's position by up to 2,000 horizontal feet (600 m) if necessary in the final moments before landing.

While all this happens, the rover will send little signals back to NASA to let the agency know how the descent is going. Those signals will arrive on a 15-minute delay due to the speed of light and the processing time of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a NASA satellite that will act as a relay according to the agency. It will likely take up to a week before the rover uploads video of the descent (which should include an audio recording) to watch back on Earth.

TOPICS

Rafi joined Live Science in 2017. He has a bachelor's degree in journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School of journalism. You can find his past science reporting at Inverse, Business Insider and Popular Science, and his past photojournalism on the Flash90 wire service and in the pages of The Courier Post of southern New Jersey.