Perseverance Rover Mars Landing 2-18-21

The rover is scheduled to touchdown on Mars at around 12:55 Pm PST.



"Another exciting aspect is that the rover is officially on an astrobiology mission (in contrast to her predecessor "Curiosity"). This means that looking for biosignatures of ancient life on Mars is one of the mission objectives."

I've been waiting patiently.. I'm looking forward to the helicopter test

Hopefully it makes it. Very few missions to Mars succeed, including just orbital insertion. The combined success rate for all Mars missions is just 40%.
Of all the 12 landing attempts from various nations, only 8 have made it (All NASA.)
Thankfully all NASA missions to Mars since '99 have been successful.

L8APEX said:

Hopefully it makes it. Very few missions to Mars succeed, including just orbital insertion. The combined success rate for all Mars missions is just 40%.
Of all the 12 landing attempts from various nations, only 8 have made it (All NASA.)
Thankfully all NASA missions to Mars since '99 have been successful.

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I'm not worried about that stat. Doesn't add up with timeline/technology.

Although the landing module looks unecessarily complicated so who knows

The successfulness of the MSL sky crane (rocket powered drone/ final stage of the decent system) that lowered Curiosity successfully, before cutting the suspension cables to fly off and crash I think left them a bit more ballsy when it comes to the landings.
They went from the smaller simple rovers that basically landed in encased in airbags like Spirit and Opportunity in the '00s that were very overbuilt and lasted 20x the original mission to very complex descent systems paired with continually larger payloads as the rovers themselves have become the size of cars and much more complex, not to mention mistakes will happen. We had a Mars climate satellite come in to shallow/hot on its insertion burn, and burn up in Mars atmosphere in the late 90's because Lockheed made it's software guidance to use imperial units and NASA was using metric in their software.
The Brits successfully landed a spacecraft a few years back (Beagle 2), but it failed to unfold all of it's "pedals" leaving it unable to communicate, dead on the surface.
Any KSP players can relate when it comes to Duna missions on the mistakes side. Failure is always an option.

I did not know Curiosity used the MSL. Cool. I wish they were able to film it .

Pretty cool to watch this live.
Thanks for the share!

Sent from my SM-G965U using the svtperformance.com mobile app

Made it safely, new discoveries await.

First picture from the rover...

MarcSpaz said:

First picture from the rover...

View attachment 1689863

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Lunar landing was a hoax, that's obviously Montana. Stop being sheep.

Black02GT said:

Lunar landing was a hoax, that's obviously Montana. Stop being sheep.

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LOL

MarcSpaz said:

LOL

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Figured I'd come in and make that joke before someone came in and said it seriously.

I have to get my pics from Kennedy last time I went uploaded somewhere I can share. Some good photos, just too big for the forum. Was a fun trip.

I'm waiting on Coosawjack to confirm he saw it through his binoculars

That's amazing. Everything so far has gone apparently very smoothly and as hoped.

Hopefully Perseverance is as successful as Spirit, or even better it's twin Opportunity, that little guy ran from 2004-to 2018 and was designed for a 90 Sol mission (~88 Earth days), did >28 miles over 15 years.


It was sad to see it go offline back in June of '18.
You might remember the “My battery is low and it’s getting dark” as it's last words, as a planetwide dust storm that lasted from May of '18 to September was blocking it's solar panels from keeping the batteries charged, and finally ran too low to keep the mission clock going, so it couldn't wake back up after the storm.

Here's a great animation of the entry/landing

blk02edge said:

Here's a great animation of the entry/landing

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Cool landing vehicle. I guess the drop pod just goes and ****s off out of the area to study and crashes? Not way it makes it back out of the atmosphere.

Next up that James Webb scope!