Can-Do Spirit in a Can’t-Do Age

Texas is frozen and dark with millions out of power or water amid an all-out assault by winter. Millions more Americans are infected with COVID-19 and hundreds of thousands are dead while governments at all levels have responded to the crisis with either tenuous competence or barely controlled chaos. Our roads and bridges are crumbling, and our computers are constantly hacked by foreign powers. This is America’s can't-do age.

But Americans aren’t quite ready to release their grip on our storied can-do past. Thanks to our science and industry, along with financial help from Washington, several vaccines have been developed at a blistering pace. A little further from home, at Mars—a place even colder than Texas—Americans at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California (JPL) are snubbing their noses at failure and pinning their hopes on a plutonium-powered SUV and the most unusual helicopter ever built—robot ambassadors of Earth now set for the most ambitious exploration ever of another world. These little machines are proof positive that we can still dream, and do, mighty things. If there was a Nobel Prize for audacity, the folks at JPL would win it.

The SUV, NASA’s Perseverance rover, is packed with a series of firsts for our exploration of the solar system. And the rover left Earth behind at a pretty good time as it turned out. Just as the COVID-19 pandemic was gripping the world, she lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida on July 30 atop an Atlas V-541 rocket. She made the cosmically brief 290-million-mile trip to Mars and arrived Thursday, February 18, 2021, flying 12,000 miles per hour, about six times faster than a rifle bullet. The vast distances involved are hard for the human mind to grasp, but for comparison, launching a spaceship from Florida and getting it to a patch of Martian dust a few miles wide is similar to shooting a basketball from Madison Square Garden in New York and sinking the shot at Staples Center in LA, nothing but net. Surely, the greatest three-pointer of them all. So, just getting to Mars is no simple task, let alone landing there. Less than 50% of missions to the Martian surface have touched down successfully. A lot of those failures were in the early years of exploration and lately, our track record has been strong, but Mars still has a well-earned reputation as a spaceship killer.

Sticking the Landing

The Martian atmosphere is less than one percent that of Earth’s. It’s thick enough to burn up a spacecraft if you get the math wrong, but not thick enough to slow it down for a gentle landing without a lot of help. So, the tools we use to slow re-entering spacecraft on Earth—parachutes for capsules, wings for the Space Shuttle—won’t work. There just isn’t enough air to slow down. Retro rockets powering a descent all the way to the ground won’t work either with an object so heavy (the rover weighs a ton). The power needed would throw up such a dust cloud it could damage sensitive instruments on the rover. 

Perseverance’s success makes her NASA's ninth landing on Mars and America’s fifth rover. To date, only America has successfully landed on Mars, though that could change this year. In fact, Martian traffic management is busier than ever. In addition to NASA’s new rover, China’s Tianwen-1 orbiter and rover entered orbit around Mars on February 10, though the rover component isn’t scheduled to land until May or June. A day before Tianwen arrived, on February 9, the United Arab Emirates’ Hope orbiter pulled up to the Red Planet, and plans to study the Martian climate, helping to better understand what Mars was like billions of years ago when we know its atmosphere could have supported life. It’s a party at Mars these days. But for now, Perseverance is the main event, and the landing was never going to be easy.

Her older sister, Curiosity, is about the same size and posed many of the same challenges around what the space agency calls Entry, Descent and Landing, or EDL. For Curiosity’s arrival at Mars in 2012, the brainiacs at JPL came up with an ingenious and daring, 12-stage EDL plan, famously including a flying “sky crane” for the final touchdown. NASA has been unable to uncover signs of current life on Mars with previous missions, beginning in the 1970s with the two Viking landers. So, Perseverance poses a different question—was there ever life on the Red Planet?

A Promising but Dangerous Destination

To find out the answer to the question of ancient Martian life, the rover will explore Jezero Crater, the site of a lake some 4 billion years ago—tantalizingly about the same time life was bubbling up here on Earth. Perseverance will look for microfossils in the rocks and soil. But promising as Jezero is as a likely site of preserved ancient life, it’s also a particularly dangerous place to land, with steep cliffs, sand dunes, and boulder fields. Still, NASA’s learned a lot from previous touchdown successes and failures and built new tech into Perseverance which allowed her to target the intended landing site more precisely and deal with unexpected problems on her own since the team at JPL was too far away to help.

Now that she’s arrived safely to the popping of champagne corks in Pasadena, it’s time to get to work. Perseverance is a stunning display of NASA know-how and a platform for many firsts in the exploration of our solar system. Sophisticated as they have become, you just can’t send an entire exobiology laboratory to Mars, so the tools aboard our robot ambassadors have limits. This new mission hopes to solve that problem by collecting additional samples, packaging them for flight, and leaving them to be plucked off the Martian surface by a similarly audacious future retrieval mission, also never done before. If all goes well (and, hey, it’s 2020s America—what could go wrong?) NASA should have the first-ever samples from another planet available for study here on Earth (no offense to Apollo, but the moon doesn’t count as a planet) sometime in the 2030s.

Flying the Unfriendly Skies

Hitching a ride with Perseverance is the first aircraft ever designed to fly in the atmosphere of an alien planet. While the rover weighs a ton, this little helicopter tips the scales at just four pounds (on Earth). It’s called Ingenuity, is solar-powered and designed to prove that powered flight in Mars’ thin air is possible. The Red Planet’s atmosphere is 99% thinner than Earth’s and its gravity is just one-third as strong, so building a working aircraft for this alien environment would be a stunning achievement all by itself. Ingenuity is designed to fly autonomously for up to 90 seconds at a time, nearly a thousand feet each trip at 10 to 15 feet from the ground. It may not sound like much until you remember that the Wright Brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk lasted just 12 seconds. 

If it works, future Martian aircraft could be used as scouts or as full-blown aerial laboratories, carrying instrument payloads. Ingenuity’s mission is independent of Perseverance, so whether or not she successfully takes to the air will not affect the rover’s work.

Finally, Perseverance will help pave the way for footprints to join her tread marks in the Martian dust. She carries an instrument appropriately called MOXIE, the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment. MOXIE is about the size of a car battery and will try to turn carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere into oxygen, another first. If successful, we could have a tool to make breathable air for future astronauts and a component to make rocket fuel on Mars.

Perseverance has a lot of work ahead and Ingenuity a lot of buzzing about to do. First, they had to get there safely. Thanks to a lot of inspired hard work by humans back on a sullen Earth, these little Martian robots offer a reminder of our can-do spirit.