NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover will use some of the best Martian maps ever made
NASA’s next Mars rover, Perseverance, will explore the Red Planet with the aid of some of the most precise Martian maps ever created. The rover will be able to identify and avoid hazards during its harrowing touchdown. Perseverance, the centrepiece of NASA’s $2.7 billion Mars 2020 mission, is scheduled to launch from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Thursday morning (July 30). If all goes according to plan, the car-sized rover will touch down inside Mars’ Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021. The 28-mile-wide (45 kilometres) Jezero hosted a lake and a river delta in the ancient past, making it an ideal destination for the life-hunting, sample-caching Perseverance. Ideal scientifically, anyway. The crater is covered in rough and rugged terrain, especially in the delta region so enticing to mission researchers, posing a challenge for the engineers tasked with getting the six-wheeled robot down safely.
Mars 2020 will meet that challenge with the help of several new technologies. One of the most important is Terrain-Relative Navigation (TRN), which will allow the mission’s sky-crane descent stage to assess the Jezero landscape for hazards during its landing approach and change course autonomously if need be. That’s where the ground-breaking cartography comes in. Mars 2020 will take advantage of two maps that United States Geological Survey (USGS) researchers created using imagery captured by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Mars 2020 will snap photos of the Jezero landscape as it descends through the Red Planet sky next February. Its onboard TRN system will then compare this imagery to the precisely aligned maps, in a manner similar to that employed by facial-recognition software. “It can then identify, ‘Are we going to be landing on a red pixel?’ and, if we are, fire its retrorockets and navigate to the closest green pixel possible,” Robin Fergason, a research geophysicist at the USGS’ Astrogeology Science Center in Flagstaff, Arizona, told Space.com. “If we didn’t have Terrain-Relative Navigation, the probability of landing safely at Jezero Crater is about 80 to 85%. But with Mars 2020, we can actually bring that probability of success of landing safely at Jezero Crater all the way up to 99% safe every single time,” Mars 2020 guidance and control engineer Swati Mohan, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said in a 2019 NASA video about TRN. (JPL built Perseverance, developed its TRN system and will manage mission operations on the Red Planet).