Perseverance Is Quietly Cruising Toward Mars
Six weeks after launch, NASA's Perseverance rover is deep into its seven-month coast to Jezero Crater, targeting a February 18, 2021 landing.
It’s easy to forget about a spacecraft once the launch broadcast ends and the news cycle moves on, but Perseverance is out there right now, quietly doing the least glamorous part of its job: coasting.
NASA’s next Mars rover left Cape Canaveral on July 30, and since then it’s been on a roughly seven-month cruise through interplanetary space. No dramatic footage, no live telemetry most of us are watching, just a spacecraft following a long, carefully plotted arc toward Mars. Six weeks in, that’s exactly where it should be. Landing is targeted for February 18, 2021, in Jezero Crater.
Jezero is the interesting part of this story, even in September. It’s an ancient crater that scientists are confident once held a lake, complete with a river delta feeding into it. If you’re looking for a place on Mars where microbial life might have existed billions of years ago, a former lakebed with delta sediments is about as good a bet as the planet offers. Deltas on Earth are great at trapping and preserving organic material, and the hope is that Mars did something similar.
Why this mission is different
Past rovers have mostly been about characterizing Mars, reading the geology, checking for habitability. Perseverance carries that torch too, but its headline task is more ambitious: it’s going to drill core samples of rock and soil and seal them into tubes, caching them on the surface for a future mission to retrieve and eventually return to Earth. That’s a big deal because no matter how good the instruments we send to Mars are, they don’t compare to what a full terrestrial lab can do with an actual sample in hand.
The catch, of course, is that “future mission to retrieve them” doesn’t exist yet in hardware form. Perseverance is the first of at least two, probably three, missions needed to actually get Mars rock back to Earth. It’s a long game, and this cruise phase is step one of many.
Between now and February, don’t expect much rover news. There will likely be a trajectory correction maneuver or two along the way, some instrument checkouts, maybe a status update from the mission team, but nothing that will make headlines. That’s fine. Interplanetary travel is supposed to be boring in the middle. The exciting parts are launch, landing, and everything after.
Landing itself is going to be the nail-biter. Jezero’s terrain, with its delta and steep crater walls, is more hazardous than the flat plains previous rovers set down on, which is why this mission is flying an upgraded terrain-relative navigation system to help it avoid boulders and cliffs during descent. That’s a problem for February, though. For now, Perseverance is just quietly falling toward Mars, and the rest of us have a few months to get up to speed on Jezero Crater before things get interesting again.