Perseverance is on its way to Mars

They launched it today.

Perseverance. A one-ton rover strapped to the top of an Atlas V rocket, currently burning across 300 million miles of void toward a crater on Mars named Jezero. It’ll arrive in February. Seven months of coast through interplanetary space, followed by seven minutes of controlled terror as it decelerates from 12,000 mph to zero using parachutes, retro-rockets, and a sky crane that lowers the rover on cables like the world’s most expensive puppet.

The landing system is absurd. I’ve watched the animation a dozen times and it still looks fake. A rocket-powered platform hovering above the Martian surface, lowering a car-sized laboratory on nylon tethers, then flying away to crash somewhere nearby. Someone at NASA JPL designed that with a straight face.

But that’s not the part I keep thinking about.

The helicopter

Strapped to the belly of Perseverance is a small drone called Ingenuity. It weighs 1.8 kilograms. It has two counter-rotating blades, each about 1.2 meters long. And it’s going to try to fly on Mars.

The Martian atmosphere is about 1% as dense as Earth’s. One percent. Think about what that means for a helicopter. Helicopter blades work by pushing air down. On Mars, there’s almost no air to push. The blades have to spin at roughly 2,400 RPM to generate enough lift. For context, a typical Earth helicopter spins its blades at 400-500 RPM.

The Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk in 1903. 118 years later, we’re attempting the first powered flight on another planet. The parallels aren’t lost on NASA. They put a small swatch of fabric from the Wright Flyer on Ingenuity. A piece of the first aircraft to fly on Earth, traveling to Mars to witness the first aircraft to fly there.

I love that.

Why Jezero Crater

The landing site isn’t random. Jezero Crater was once a lake. About 3.5 billion years ago, a river delta fed into it, depositing layers of sediment that might, might, contain signs of ancient microbial life.

I want to sit with that for a second. We chose the landing site because it used to be a lake. On Mars. A planet that right now is a frozen, irradiated desert with no liquid water on its surface. But billions of years ago, it had rivers and lakes and maybe, possibly, life.

Perseverance is going to drill core samples from the ancient lakebed and cache them in tubes on the surface. A future mission will pick them up and bring them to Earth. That mission doesn’t exist yet. We’re launching the first half of a plan whose second half hasn’t been funded.

There’s something beautiful about that optimism. We’re sending a robot to collect samples on the assumption that we’ll send another robot to pick them up, on the assumption that we’ll build a rocket to bring them home, on the assumption that someone will fund all of this. It’s planning on a civilizational timescale.

The wait

Perseverance is in space right now. Between planets. Moving at about 24,600 mph. I can go to NASA’s tracker and see exactly where it is, how far from Earth, how far from Mars.

It’ll arrive on February 18, 2021. I’ve already set a reminder. I’ll stay up for it.

Seven months of waiting. Seven minutes of terror. And then, if everything works, a helicopter on Mars.

Someone at NASA said “let’s try it anyway” and I think that might be the most human sentence I’ve ever heard.

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