CBS 60 Minutes Part 2
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mars-ingen ... 021-05-09/
As he sat in the control room, Al Chen, the leader of the landing team, had absolutely no control. Radio signals would take about 11 minutes to travel from Earth to Mars. The spacecraft was pre-programmed to descend, maneuver, and pick a landing site on its own. All the work his colleagues hoped to do on Mars would be impossible if his part of the mission failed.
Anderson Cooper: How long have you been working on this mission?
Al Chen: Coming up on nine years, or so.
Anderson Cooper: Really? That's a lot of work for seven minutes of--
Al Chen: Yep. Nine--
Anderson Cooper: --terror.
Al Chen: -- nine years of work, seven minutes of terror. (LAUGH)
Anderson Cooper: It's done if the parachute doesn't work.
Al Chen: That's right. You know, no one wants to be that-- the guy the drops the baton.
No landing by a spacecraft has ever been recorded as well as this one. There were six cameras capturing it all from different angles. The parachute deployed. Then the heat shield fell away like a lens cap, and Perseverance got its first look at the ground. This is not a simulation. This is what it looks like to parachute onto Mars.
Anderson Cooper: How fast is it moving at this point?
Al Chen: Yeah, we're still going about 350 miles an hour, and still slowing down
Anderson Cooper: So it looks gentle here, but in fact you're-- the-- it's falling at more than 300 miles an hour.
Al Chen: That's right. We're heading straight down at-- at near-racecar speeds.
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Below lay a series of safe landing spots. But the wind was blowing the spacecraft towards more treacherous territory to the east. And Perseverance sent a message to Earth saying the thrusters it needed to slow down might not be working properly.
Anderson Cooper: So you get a reading saying the jets that are going to help it slow down and control the landing, that they're not working?
Al Chen: The stopping power.
Anderson Cooper: So what do you do?
Al Chen: There's nothing you can do, right? Everything already happened. That's the mind-bending part of this, right?
Anderson Cooper: You are sweating now, you were just talking about it.
Al Chen: Yeah, exactly, I'm right back there again. (LAUGHTER). So, ah, yeah.
To Al Chen's relief, Perseverance's computerized landing system did what it was designed to do: it found a suitable landing spot even in rocky terrain. And despite the warning, the thrusters worked. You can see them kicking up dust as they fire to slow the spacecraft down.
The descent stage known as the "skycrane" lowered Perseverance to the ground. It hovered for a moment, then flew off to crash a safe distance away.
Al Chen: And there goes the descent stage.
Anderson Cooper: Wow.
Al Chen: At that point, big sigh of relief-- you know? I almost-- collapsed over this console.
Ever since Perseverance landed on the red planet, a team of engineers, programmers, and scientists here on Earth have been living on Mars time. It's their job to monitor the rover's health and tell it where to go and how to search for signs of life. While Perseverance sleeps to conserve energy during the freezing Martian nights, the team on Earth analyzes the photographs and instrument readings it's sent back. They then prepare a list of things for it to do the following morning when it wakes up.
Matt Wallace: And so it's just after midnight on Mars. The vehicle's asleep.
Project manager Matt Wallace explained that a day on Mars is 40 minutes longer than on Earth. The team's schedule is constantly changing.
Anderson Cooper: So people here are-- are Mars night shift workers.
Matt Wallace: (LAUGH) Yeah, that's a good way to think of it.
Anderson Cooper: But, I mean, working night shift is tough enough. But-- this is a night shift that's constantly shifting--
Matt Wallace: Constantly moving.
Anderson Cooper: Yeah--
Matt Wallace: That's right. Yeah.
On Perseverance's fourth day on Mars, it swiveled the powerful camera on its mast and took a look around. A space enthusiast named Sean Doran put the images together, set them to music, and posted the movie on YouTube.
Even one of the top scientists on the project was moved when he saw it.
Ken Farley: I went and got a beer and watched this thing scroll by. And that… that was the moment (CLICK) when I felt like I was there.
Ken Farley leads the science team that will direct Perseverance through the Jezero Crater. It's an area that scientists have long wanted to search for signs of ancient life that may be hidden in the rocks.
Ken Farley: The oldest evidence of life on Earth is about three and a half billion years old. Those rocks were deposited in a shallow sea. This crater that you see here was a lake three and a half billion years ago. So we are looking at the same environment in the same time period on two different planets.
Anderson Cooper: And if it's determined, however long in the future, that, "No, there was not ever life," what does that mean?
Ken Farley: The place where Perseverance landed, here in Jezero Crater-- is the most habitable time period of Mars and the most habitable environment that we know about. This is-- this is as good as it gets, at least with our current understanding of what Mars has to offer. And if we don't find life here, it does make us worry that perhaps it doesn't exist anywhere.
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Perseverance hasn't strayed far from its landing site yet, but it's telescopic camera has already spotted a large number of boulders that Ken Farley says he didn't expect to see in the middle of an ancient lake.
Anderson Cooper: So this has surprised you.
Ken Farley: Absolutely, yeah.
Anderson Cooper: So what did those boulders tell you?
Ken Farley: The most reasonable interpretation is a flood. You don't have fast flowing water out in the middle of a lake. You get fast flowing water in a river. And so what that's telling us is: there was a river that was capable of transporting boulders that were this big.
Anderson Cooper: So what? The lake would have gone down perhaps and then later on there was a flood?
Ken Farley: Yeah. Exactly.
Perseverance was supposed to leave Ingenuity behind after a 30-day demonstration of its flying ability. But NASA officials recently said they'll keep the duo together for another month to explore how rovers and helicopters might work together in the future.
The fastest that Perseverance was designed to travel is a tenth of a mile per hour. Ingenuity has already gone 80 times faster, according to project manager Mimi Aung.
Mimi Aung: Adding an aerial vehicle, a flying vehicle for space exploration will be game changing.
Anderson Cooper: It frees you, in a way.
Mimi Aung: Absolutely, yes. So, a flying vehicle, a rotorcraft would allow us to get to places we simply can't access today, like sites of steep cliffs, you know, inside deep crevices.
After Perseverance explores the floor of Jezero Crater, it'll head towards what's believed to be the remnant of an ancient river delta, where billions of years ago conditions should have been ripe for microorganisms to exist. As this simulation shows, the rover's robotic arm can collect about 40 core samples of rock that'll be sealed in special tubes and left on the planet's surface. NASA plans to send another mission to Mars to retrieve the tubes and bring them back to Earth. In about ten years, Ken Farley says, scientists examining those samples may be confronted with a new and perplexing question.
Ken Farley: How do you look for life that may not be life as you know it? We've never had to do that before, we've never had to actually ask the question...
Anderson Cooper: "Is there a form of life that we can't even conceive of?"
Ken Farley: Yeah, we're gonna have to conceive of it. I think that's the whole point of this: We're gonna have to start conceiving of life as we don't know it.
If all goes according to plan, Perseverance will be making tracks on Mars for years to come. Since it's carrying the first working audio microphones on the red planet, we leave you with what it sounds like as the one-ton rover slowly moves across the vast, lonely expanses of Mars.
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