In recent days, a series of photographs have gone viral again showing the remains of a crashed spacecraft on the surface of Mars. They are images taken by POT in 2022 and what lies behind it is nothing mysterious, but certainly striking and a unique vision of space exploration. What they show are the remains of the space capsule Aeroshellwhich transported the rover Perseverance and to the helicopterIngenuity to Mars in 2020and which had the mission of deploying them after penetrating the Martian atmosphere at 20,000 km/h.
A risky operation that NASA defined at the time as ‘7 minutes of terror’in reference to the time it takes for communications between Earth and Mars and what mission control would wait to find out if the landing had been successful once it had taken place.
The images were taken by Ingenuity in the Flight 26made on April 19, 2022. The Martian helicopter far exceeded initial expectations of carrying out 5 flights on Mars and completed up to 75damaging one of its blades in the 76 and not being able to take off again after this accident that took place in January of this year.
Among the many obstacles that the mission had to overcome Mars 2020 was the critical moment of landing on the Martian surface. It was not the first one carried out by NASA, but None before Perseverance had been done with such a large and heavy machine.
Before Mars 2020, NASA’s Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity rovers had successfully landed on the red planet. Sojournerin 1996did so within a platform from which it was deployed, already on the ground, although it barely managed to survive. Spirit and Opportunity They achieved it, both in 2004using a system of external airbags that protected them at the moment of contact with the surface. Curiositydeployed in 2012 and much heavier than the previous ones – 11.5 kg, 185 kg, 185 kg and 899 kg, respectively – made this solution unfeasible, which gave rise to the birth of the system Sky Crane.
Sky Crane emerged after NASA engineers They would rule out any other possibility to land a vehicle of that size —Perseverance is like a small car weighing one ton—on Mars and, although it was initially considered as a ‘crazy’ idea by the directors of NASA, was the one that finally managed to MSL (Mars Science Laboratorythe Curiosity mission) and Mars 2020 could be carried out successfully.
The Perseverance rover, with the Ingenuity helicopter inside, took off inside the space capsule Aeroshellpropelled by the rocket Atlas V-451on July 30, 2020. After a 7-month journey, Aeroshell entered the Martian atmosphere at a speed of 20,000 km/h.
Without the protection of the space capsule, capable of withstanding temperatures of up to 870°Cthe rover would have been destroyed. Aeroshell, manufactured by Lockheed Martinopened a huge parachute that allowed him to reduce his speed to 320km/h. During this period, the capsule ejected front casing —the base, to understand us—, which left Perseverance exposed to the Martian atmosphere, and then the cone-shaped rear casing.
Next, Aeroshell He lowered the rover with tether cables until it made contact with the groundalready at a speed of 126km/hwhile the capsule structure maintained control of the flight with its engines. With Perseverance on the ground, Aeroshell moved away from the rover to finally crash a few hundred meters into Jezero Craterthe planned landing site.
Images taken by Ingenuity show remains of the capsule, the cone-shaped rear shell of Aeroshell and part of the parachute which made possible the successful landing of Perseverance, which will be four years old on February 18.
As NASA explained in its blog about these images, ‘the protective layer on the back casing appears to have remained intact during the atmospheric entry of Mars‘ and much of the ’80 high-strength suspension lines connecting the rear casing to the parachute are visible and also appear intact.’ Furthermore, ‘the cover (of the parachute) shows no signs of damage by the supersonic air flow during inflation’, valuable information for future missions on Mars and the reason why Ingenuity flew over the landing debris at 8 meters high.